


et cetera

by pocky_slash



Series: Team Shithead [15]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Graduate School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-11-12 06:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 26,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash
Summary: Ficlets, tumblr prompts, and and deleted scenes from the shithead ghosthunters AU.Chapter Fourteen: Molly is excited to study the internet famous haunted chair that Laurens brought back to the lab, but equally excited to work with Laurens and Ham on a real investigation.Chapter Fifteen: Alex before and after John gets his tattoo.Chapter Sixteen: John hates running, but not as much as he hates talking about his feelings.Chapter Seventeen: It's after one and John still hasn't gotten out of bed.Chapter Eighteen: Three-sentence ficlets.





	1. August 14, 2014

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends! If you follow me on tumblr, you already heard this spiel, but here we are again:  
> So, I’ve started in earnest on the next story, working title “everyone has a shitty summer.” My GOAL is to have that one fully drafted by the end of the summer and the next one, with the Schulyers, mostly drafted as well. Obvs I am NOT GREAT at deadlines, but I’m gonna push myself to at least do the first thing. I would love to have all of the words I’ve written so far posted by the end of the 2017.
> 
> Through the summer, I’m going to start posting all of the random ficlets on my tumblr here on AO3 in a collection. I’m going to go back to the Monday and Friday posting schedule, with the distant hope being that once I’m done moving them over, I can transition right into posting the next story.
> 
> So, if you don't follow me on tumblr, this will all be new to you! If you do, maybe it'll be a nice trip down memory lane!
> 
>  **Chapter One:** This was for a timestamp meme--the prompt was August 14, 2014.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex and John, one week before they meet.

_New York City, NY_

"Hey, are you selling the desk, too?" a scrawny blonde kid asks.

"The furniture stays," Alex says to the three or four freshmen scoping out the junk spread out across his apartment. "Literally anything that isn’t furniture and isn’t in the suitcases in the closet is up for grabs. Name your price."

Surprisingly, he managed to get through most of the summer living off his savings and the modest income that comes in from his blog. That’s nothing to dismiss in New York City, where a beer at a dive bar costs nearly as much as a six-pack back home. Not that Alex has been out at many dive bars this summer. Or any bars, really. It’s entirely possible that the only reason he was able to live off of his savings and blog alone is that he never really left the apartment. Ned took him out a couple of times, but he always footed the bill–Alex has a feeling that was a directive from Mr. Stevens back home–and other than that, Alex has been…well. Here.

The money’s just about run out, though, save for the chunk he set aside to get through the first month at MUNJ, before his stipend starts coming in. He’s still got a week before he heads out to Jersey, and while he can live for a week on ramen, selling his stuff serves the dual purpose of making him a little quick cash and clearing out all the stuff he doesn’t want to bother moving across the river.

"So, not the desk, then?" the blonde kid asks again. Alex pinches the bridge of his nose and despairs for the incoming freshman class at Columbia. Just being in the same room as his idiot is making his head hurt.

But it’s almost over. Just a week. One more week and he’ll be taking his suitcases to Penn Station and getting a one-way ticket to Morristown, NJ. A one-way ticket to his future. He smiles at the thought.

"What about the couch?" the blonde kid asks, and Alex casts his eyes heavenward, asking a deity he doesn’t believe in to give him strength.

One. More. Week. It wouldn’t do to be arrested for murdering a freshman when he’s just one week away from the rest of his life.

*

_Morristown, NJ_

One. More. Week.

John has one more week left of his mindless retail job. Maybe even less–Pedro hasn’t put up next week’s schedule yet because he’s a _jackass_ , so it’s entirely possible that tomorrow is his last day.

Unlikely, but possible.

"Excuse me, can you help me with my iPhone?" a middle-aged soccer mom asks.

John glances up at the sign hanging above him to make sure he hasn’t wandered away from his station in a boredom fugue state. Nope. He’s still standing under a sign for printing services.

"I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll need to talk to someone at the phone counter for that," he tells her. "I can page someone over to help you."

"Why can’t _you_ help me?" she asks, crossing her arms. "You’re not doing anything."

"I’m working the copy desk, ma’am," John says, with the last of his patience, frayed nearly through after two months of forty hours a week of retail. "I’m not trained on mobile phones, but if you’ll hold on for one moment–"

"How much training do you need?" she asks. "It’s just a cellphone, for god’s sake!"

 _Then how come you had to drag your ass downtown and into a store to ask some minimum wage kid how to work yours?_ he wants to say.

He doesn’t say that.

"I’ll page them right now," he tells her. "Kelly or Tamika will meet you over at the mobile phone counter."

She glares at him and then turns on her heel, flipping her hair over her shoulder pointedly as she does so. John doesn’t flip her off, though he desperately wants to.

"Tamika," he says quietly into his radio, "there’s an angry white lady who needs you to teach her how to use her iPhone."

" _Why do you torture me, Laurens?_ " he hears in his earpiece. 

"Because I can see Kelly talking to someone over by cameras and I know you’ll manage to steer her in the right direction without starting a fire behind the desk."

Tamika snorts. So do a few other people.

" _What do you mean?_ " Damien asks. " _Anyway, I’m around, I can help her._ "

" _FBS,_ " Tamika says, and John laughs. ‘Fine But Simple’–Damien should have it tattooed to his forehead. " _Heading over there now._ "

John sees Tamika approach the phone counter with her customer smile plastered on her face. Damien wanders over to the copy desk, frowning over at Tamika and the customer.

"I never know what that bitch means when she talks," he mutters.

"You call her a bitch in front of me one more time, I’ll have your balls," John says. Damien rolls his eyes and then leans over to pick up a flashdrive that someone knocked from the display earlier. John stares at his ass and sighs. There are many different ways he’d like to have Damien’s balls.

In theory. Damien’s hot as hell, but god, just listening to him talk drives John mad. Better to put a dick in his mouth to shut him up, probably.

"Anyway," Damien says once he’s standing up again. "She’s hot though, right? Like, damn."

John pinches the bridge of his nose. "Damien. I’ve worked with you for two months. Eventually you’re gonna absorb that I’m gay, right?"

"Yeah," Damien says, "but, like…she’s hot, right?"

John narrowly avoids slamming his head into the copy desk or shaking some basic common sense into Damien by clinging to his new mantra.

One. More. Week.


	2. Photographic Evidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first picture of Alex on John's instagram and the first picture of boyfriend!Alex on John's instagram.

Herc is telling them all a really ludicrous story, something that John barely believes actually happened, but that he tells with such conviction and sensation that John's hanging on his every word. Laf is, too, and so is the new kid.

And maybe John's not hanging on Herc's _every word_ , because he glances away from Herc to check Hamilton out again. Alex. The funny thing is, he's nothing like the type of guy that John normally goes for. He doesn't have a _type_ , exactly, but Alex isn't conventionally hot the way that most of John's exes and hook-ups have been. Francis could have been a model and Long actually was. Adrian was in a band. Paulo had men and women both swooning at the sight of him. The list, embarrassingly, goes on.

Alex isn't striking in that way, but there _is_ something about him that John can't look away from. He can't put his finger on it, can't distill it, but he doesn't have to, not really. Alex is clearly into him, too, and John is looking forward to taking that to its natural conclusion.

Aside from Alex's general... _je ne sais quoi_...John can't help but notice that he clicks in with the three of them like they've all been friends for years. Even if they fuck once and it doesn't go anywhere, he's happy he's found Alex, that _they've_ found him, because he just fits. Their group feels complete. It's weird, and maybe it's the beer talking, but it's almost like they were just waiting for him to find them.

John thinks about that as he slips away to take a piss and he's still thinking about it on his way back. He stops a few feet away from the table, tilts his head to the side, really looks at them. Herc is still talking, waving his hands about. Laf is smirking around his beer bottle as he watches. Alex is ugly-laughing, which is really fucking endearing. Mostly, though, they all look...happy. Comfortable. At home.

John pulls out his phone without even thinking about it and frames the shot. He takes two steps to the right to get the lighting right and rocks up onto his toes to change the angle just slightly. He taps the screen and then looks down at the photo. Herc gesturing, Laf smirking, Alex laughing, with the muddy yellow light of the bar making the photo seem old and worn and warm. He smiles to himself and types a caption. _Raise a glass to the four of us_

It finishes posting just as he returns to the table and pulls himself back up onto his stool, maybe leaning a little further into Alex's personal space than is strictly necessary. Alex doesn't seem to mind.

"So, what'd I miss?" he asks, and Herc launches back into his story full throttle. John sits back and drinks his beer and, for once, let's himself enjoy life as it happens. He can go back to worrying, back to wallowing, back to his usual anxiety later.

*

"You're going to kill yourself," John says casually. He's perched on the edge of a lab table, because if Alex is gonna get all macho and spurn his help, he's not gonna bother putting much effort into helping.

"I'm fine," Alex insists, but it sounds strained. John had been trying to reach a binder full of past field notes that was perched on top of a supply cabinet. When he couldn't reach, Alex had pushed him away to do it himself, even though John was a good twelve additional inches away, even while standing on the step-stool, and Alex is _only a fucking inch taller than John anyway_. 

He couldn't reach it, obviously, and instead of letting John help or waiting for Laf to get back, he made it his mission to get the binder down himself. John would chalk it up to nerves about their upcoming field trip with Washington, but he's been around Alex long enough at this point to know that he's just a stubborn asshole. He's put a bucket on the step-stool and is perched on it on his toes. His fingers are still just shy of reaching the binder and John gives him about a fifty percent chance of succeeding and a fifty percent chance of falling to the ground and ending up in traction for the rest of the semester. 

"There are probably twenty better ways to do this," John says.

"I'm _fine_ ," Alex repeats, grunting as he tries to pull himself up just that much more. John shakes his head and pulls out his phone. He frames the shot, but hesitates before capturing the image. It occurs to him, embarrassingly, that he's never posted a solo picture of Alex before. Which wouldn't be a big deal at all, except that Alex said the boyfriend word today—well, acknowledged John's use of it, at any rate, and seemed to have no issue with John's boss using it—and if they're gonna start throwing that word around, does he really want the first picture of Alex he posts to be something so stupid?

More to the point, if the first picture of Alex that he posts ends with Alex in the hospital, how shitty will he feel? Also, how much will Mattie make fun of him?

Still, doing stupid shit is pretty much the natural order of things where Alex is concerned. There probably isn't a better way to introduce him to John's stupid instagram followers outside of a video of him just talking non-stop for twenty minutes.

He snaps the picture, fiddles with the framing and filter, and then types _if my boyfriend dies trying to reach this shelf this will officially be the shortest relationship of my life #sixhours #giveortake_

He posts it and sits back to watch Alex continue to struggle. Less than a minute goes by before his phone screen lights up with a notification.

 **mattiemanners** _UM EXCUSE ME BOYFRIEND?_

"You okay there, champ?" John calls out.

"Fuck off," Alex mutters through clenched teeth.

 **not_snerual** _@mattiemanners guy i was telling you about. i mean we've kinda been sort of dating for like, two weeks, but i said the boyfriend word today and he was p chill. also "six hours" is funnier than "two weeks."_

"Babe, I really don't have time to drive you to the hospital this afternoon, ER wait times are ridiculous," John says.

"I've almost got it!"

 **mattiemanners** _@not_snerual text me a picture of his face this is important johnny boy_

"I'm giving you another minute, at which point I am physically stopping you from continuing to attempt this."

 **not_snerual** _@mattiemanners i really wish that stupid nickname died with our fake relationship. i'm gonna stop him from dying i'll text you later._

John puts his phone to sleep and shoves it in his back pocket, then hops off the lab table and marches over to the cabinet. It's not hard at all to climb onto the first step of the step-stool and hold Alex still by his legs. It's even easier to wrap his arms around Alex's hips and lift him off the bucket, then step back onto the solid floor. Alex barely has time to squawk in indignation.

He's glaring at John when John lowers him to the floor.

"You would have been pissed if you fell and missed our first field assignment," John says. " _I_ would have been pissed if you fell and hurt some part of your body that's crucial to my happiness."

Alex sniffs haughtily. "I knew you only wanted me for my body."

"I am _very_ into unwashed hair and pointy elbows," John agrees. He pulls out his phone again. "Keep that pissy face, my friend Martha wants a picture of you and I figure it's best to be as true to life as possible."

Alex flips him off with both hands, but his pout is turning into the beginning of the goofy smile that John has become so fond of. He snaps the picture and sends it off to Mattie over iMessage, then puts his phone back into his pocket without waiting for a reply.

"There's a solid fifteen to twenty minutes until we have to leave for class," John says. "Do you really want to spend it balancing on a ladder? Because I have some other ideas."

"I told you," Alex says, approaching John slowly and grinning, "only for my body. It's my curse."

"It's a blessing from this end," John says, and smiles into Alex's kiss.

In his back pocket, his phone buzzes, but John just wraps his arms around Alex's neck and pulls him closer. Martha can wait.


	3. Practice Sketch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Are you drawing me?"

John is a distant, comfortable presence on the edge of Alex's peripheral vision, seated on the other side of the library table, bent over a notebook as Alex pores over an incredibly dense legal brief about haunted properties. He notices John without noticing him, seeing him switch notebooks and rip pages out and erase angrily without actually watching him.

"If you're not doing anything important, you should help me with this," Alex murmurs, chewing on the cap of his pen.

"How the fuck do you know I'm not doing anything important?" John asks. "Also, fuck you, if I wanted to write a paper about parapsych legal precedents, I would have taken a class about parapsych legal precedents."

"But you love talking about this shit," Alex definitely doesn't whine.

"So what? Talking about it isn't the same as studying it, which is a fucking nightmare and a half."

John hasn't looked up for the entire length of the conversation, but he has started to frown down at his notebook. He sighs and rips out the page he's been scribbling on, crumpling it up and tossing it into the wastepaper basket on the floor next to their table. It's only when he lifts his hands that Alex realizes that it's not a notebook John's been writing in—he's been sketching. Which is a whole other level of weird: Alex doesn't think he's ever seen John physically rip a page out of his sketchbook, but he's now done it at least twice since they got to the library.

"Are you sketching?" he asks, even though he knows that asking John directly about his art always carries a fifty percent chance of silent rebuke.

"I'm giving up sketching," John says. He closes his sketchbook and snaps the elastic around it, then drops it unceremoniously back into his bag. "I'm gonna go get a smoothie or something if you're gonna be doing this for a while. Come find me after."

"What's in it for me?" Alex asks as John zips up his hoodie and throws his bag over one shoulder.

John shrugs. "I'll make out with your face before class?"

That's not a bad incentive.

Alex turns his attention back to his books for a few minutes, glancing out the windows periodically. Finally, he sees John crossing the quad with Dolley and Tad, which puts him far enough away that Alex feels safe abandoning his books to fish John's discarded papers out of the trash. Sure, he's probably a little bit of a creep, but garbage is technically public property and if John didn't want him to nose around in it, he wouldn't have thrown them away at the table.

Alex isn't sure exactly what he's expecting, but it's definitely not his own face gazing back up at him.

Well, no—that's an exaggeration. The Alex on the page isn't staring; he's curled over a book the same way Alex himself has been for the past few hours. The drawings, three in total, are all pretty good as far as Alex can tell. The drawing looks a little more attractive than he does in real life—the eye bags are less pronounced and there's a softness to his features that makes him seem more inviting than sleep-deprived. He definitely looks like him, which is the best standard Alex can think to judge them on. If he saw these pictures hanging on a wall somewhere, he'd know they were pictures of him.

John seems to have disagreed with this assessment, however. There are things scribbled out, spots where he's obviously erased and re-erased over and over again. Of course, they were all fished out of the trash, which should be Alex's biggest clue that John was unhappy with them, though he can't figure out why for the life of him.

Everything in him wants to keep them as the shock at seeing his own image fades into a hum of delighted affection. Thinking about John sitting there and working diligently to capture Alex's likeness on paper makes his skin buzz pleasantly and his cheeks heat up, even though there's no one here to see it. He knows, though, that he and John walk a fine line when it comes to privacy, and holding onto these things would be a much greater offense than snooping through the library trash. Hell, the more he thinks about it, the more he feels shitty for snooping through the trash in the first place. John's inability to ask for what he wants or vocalize his feelings makes this whole privacy thing a thousand times more complicated—it's hard to tell the difference between the times John wants Alex to snoop so he doesn't have to have a full conversation about something and the times he wants to keep something to himself.

Alex sighs and crumples the papers again, tossing them into the trash even though it hurts a little to do it. He packs up his bags, because he's certainly not going to be able to focus on reading after that, and heads over to the Student Center to find John and cash in that promise of kissing before class.

*

A few days pass before Alex thinks to bring the whole thing up again. He can't exactly say "why did you throw away those drawings of me?" without showing his hand, but one evening John has his sketchbook out when they're alone in the apartment, sitting at either end of the couch. The way he's sitting, there's not much be could be sketching aside from Alex himself.

"Are you drawing me?"

John is startled when he looks up, and Alex enjoys watching the blush creep across his cheeks and throat as he quickly looks back down at his sketchbook.

"I—why?"

Alex shrugs. "Curious?" John taps his fingers on his sketchbook and looks away, so Alex pushes further. "Just—you know, I love your art. And I have a pretty big ego. So I'm kinda into those things intersecting."

John rolls his eyes and closes his book again, then slowly looks back up at Alex.

"You're...difficult to draw," he finally says. It's not the first time he's said it, but Alex still doesn't understand what it means. Something of it must show on his face, because John huffs out a little sigh and then adds, "I can't explain it. I keep trying to draw you and I can never seem to get it right. It never looks like _you_ to me. It doesn't have that...that spark of...of...youness." He deflates a little. "It's hard to explain. I just keep trying to get you down and failing and it's not like when I draw a tree that doesn't look exactly right, you know? It's...you. And if you're missing this thing that makes you so...you...then I haven't done a good job, have I?"

Alex lets the silence drag out for as long as he can stand it, which is about ten seconds. "Can I see?"

John hesitates, blushing again, and if Alex was a better person, he'd immediately tell John to forget it and change the subject. Alex is an asshole, though, so he waits for another long moment before John says, "Don't make fun of me."

"I would never," Alex promises. "Not about this. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," John says, though he doesn't sound as certain as Alex would like. He tosses the sketchbook at Alex and then curls into a ball at the edge of the couch, radiating his discomfort. Alex's fingers linger over the elastic of the book, and this time "better person" wins out over "asshole."

"If you're that upset, forget it," he says, and holds the book back out towards John. John just covers his face with his hands.

"I'm not...upset? I'm just—embarrassed, I guess." He drops his hands and tips his head back and still isn't looking at Alex.

"Why?" Alex asks.

John is quiet again. "I guess...I guess because...I think you're gorgeous. And I can't—I don't want you to see this and think I haven't done a good job of capturing you. I don't want you to see it and think it's shitty. Which you might. Because it's not great." He abruptly grabs a pillow off the couch and uses it to cover his face. "Jesus fuck, please let this conversation end. Look at the fucking thing and put me out of my misery."

"You're such a dramatic asshole," Alex says, but he kicks John's shin affectionately and flips open the sketchbook.

The picture inside is good—even better than the ones he threw away. Alex is sitting sideways on the couch, half-smiling and tapping at his tablet, just as he was ten minutes ago. He's not sure what John is so upset about, but then, he rarely understands the things that go through John's head when he's talking about drawing or photography.

He struggles to find something to say besides _This is good!_ , though he lacks the vocabulary to really compliment it the way it deserves. In the end, he settles for saying, "Can I keep this?"

John lowers the pillow slowly. "What?"

"It's good," Alex says. "Like...it's really good and I like knowing that you drew a picture of me and I want to keep it." John blinks. "If that's okay with you?"

"I...." John rubs his forehead and trails off, blinking some more. "I guess. I mean, it's not that—"

"Shut up," Alex says.

"—right. Um, sure. Just...can you not like...hang it up or anything?" He adds, quickly, "Not that you were going to or that you thought it was good enough to display. Not like you should think that. Because it's not. Just—I kind of don't want to see it?"

Alex shakes his head. "You're so weird."

"Fuck off, _you're_ so weird."

"Wanting a picture of me drawn by my super talented artist boyfriend is not fucking weird, dumbass."

"Whatever!" John throws his hands up in the air. "Just take the fucking thing so this can be over and we can never talk about it again."

Alex grabs his bag off the floor and fishes out his leatherman. He uses it to gently cut along the edge of the page, near the binding, then pulls the picture out of John's sketchbook. He slides it into the back of a nearby notebook, replaces his leatherman, and then throws the sketchbook back to John.

"Good," John says. "Let's move on with our fucking lives."

"Not quite yet." Before John can react, Alex grabs him by the ankle and yanks him down until he's lying on the couch on his back. His hair is in his face—an unfortunate side-effect of the unexpected movement—and by the time he's done sputtering and pushing it out of his eyes, Alex has climbed on top of him, propped up with one hand and grinning.

"What the fuck?"

"This is called positive reinforcement," Alex tells him. "You do a thing I like, I perform a sexual favor, and eventually your brain will associate doing the things I like with me doing the things you like."

"Thank you for explaining that to me like I'm a toddler," John says dryly. "I find that condescending tone is definitely a turn-on."

"I'll keep that in mind," Alex says, and leans down for a kiss before John can groan and shove him away.


	4. A Phone Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's point of view on the birthday phone call he gets from his dad in [i saw the whole story unwind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7927810/chapters/18662279).

John is doing okay in Morristown. Really. Truly. He wasn't sure he would be at first; after the high of defying his father wore off, he was terrified that he'd be out on the street within a week. He's done well, though. He has friends. His work is highly regarded by his mentor. He's working enough jobs to keep himself financially afloat. He has Alex. And he misses his sisters sometimes and he even misses his dad and Henry sometimes, but that's the cost of all the other wonderful things in his life. He tries not to think about it too hard. It's easier to deal with if he doesn't think about it.

Of course, it's easier not to think about it when his father isn't calling his phone at nine o'clock at night on a random Monday.

A million devastating scenarios fly through his imagination. One of the kids hurt, one of the kids dead, a fire at the house, someone has cancer...the list spirals on and on in the two seconds between looking at the screen and turning to Alex, hands shaking.

"I...have to take this," he says. "If only out of morbid curiosity." Alex looks confused, of course, so John shows him the phone, the picture of his father's face with _Dad_ displayed over it.

"Shit," Alex murmurs. John takes a deep breath, then hits accept and puts the phone up to his ear.

"Are Martha and Mellie and Henry okay?" he asks immediately. That's his biggest concern, his worst nightmare—one of the kids getting sick, getting hurt, and John being hundreds of miles and a world's worth of estrangement away.

"Good evening, John," his father says, all calm and collected, and John breathes a sigh of relief. He's seen what his father is like when one of them is hurt, and there's no way he'd be this cool if that were the case. Of course, that means he's back to square one with why his dad is on the phone in the first place. "I'm going to be out of the country tomorrow and I wanted to make sure I wished you a happy birthday."

A happy—he blinks rapidly. Maybe he's the one who's injured. Maybe he hit his head.

"Okay, uh, thanks, I guess?" he manages to say. Inside, he's asking a million questions, imagining a million scenarios that would lead to such a cordial message.

"I told you when you chose to leave," his father says. "You're still my son, even if you continue to make these choices. I still care about you. And I'm still happy to welcome you back home when you're ready to come to your senses. Or if you need help, of course."

John grits his teeth. Only his fucking father would call to gloat on his fucking birthday of all things. "No, surprisingly, everything is fine. I can, as it happens, take care of myself and it turns out I'm even pretty good at it."

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. He's...managing. But he has Alex, he has his work, he's even sort of mostly happy for a surprising amount of the time. Things could be worse. And there's no reason for his father to think he's anything but ecstatically carefree.

"I know you don't believe it, but that's good to hear," his dad says.

The worst fucking part of it is that he does believe it. His dad is an asshole but he's still his _dad_. He's cold, sometimes, and distant and awkward and stubborn and mean, but he also read John stories growing up and went to all his baseball games and bragged about John to his friends.

And it's not like John doesn't deserve the slow decline of their relationship after he...well. After.

"I trust you're taking care of yourself?" his father continues. "Eating well, sleeping well, exercising, spending time with your peers?"

It's like his dad has a fucking checklist he's going down. "Yeah, yeah," he mutters. "I have a boyfriend. You'd hate him."

His father snorts. "I don't doubt it. Let me guess—a tattooed biker college-dropout anarchist?"

John almost laughs. He forces the laugh down. His dad doesn't deserve to know he still laughs at his jokes. "No, he's a poor orphan Latino parapsychologist with a temper and a mouth. I'm pretty sure you'd murder each other if you were left in the same room together for more than a minute."

Plus, it's possible his dad will hate the truth even more than he hates his worst-case-scenario imagined son-in-law. Alex is watching with interest and John offers him a small smile.

"I see. I imagine you must have a checklist you take out to bars to ensure you're rebelling hard enough."

John swallows another laugh. It's so much easier to hate his dad when he's a distant caricature of an enemy. "No, I didn't purposely choose him because I knew you'd hate him, but it's a nice bonus," he says.

Alex makes a face and John makes a face back. Alex is right there, inches away from him. No matter how this phone call ends up going, he can immediately fall into his support system the moment he hangs up. He'll be okay, no matter how this keeps playing out.

"That's fine," his dad says. "I suppose it doesn't matter what I think anyway—I married your mother, after all, against my father's wises. As long as he treats you well and he loves you, I can't ask for more."

A lump is starting to form in John's throat and, fuck, why did he pick up this call? The guilt is starting to inch in now, the reminder that his father _loves him_ , that his father has _taken care of him_ for twenty-one years and John chose to throw all of that away just to chase ghosts and fuck around with cameras.

But that's not the whole of it. He knows that's not the whole of it, even as his brain tries to gang up on him, tries to shove him down into those sticky, lonely dark thoughts. There's nuance. Things were never perfect.

And, Alex. He has Alex now. He never would have met Alex if he had pushed down this part of him and been the good boy his father wanted.

It's wrong and it's messed up and it's unhealthy and he needs better coping skills, but Alex is everything to him. He's worth everything.

"He does," John manages to say to his dad.

"Good. I'm happy for you. I hope he's good for you."

John takes a long, slow, measured breath before he says something he regrets. He almost wants to take Alex's hand, but he's not that desperate. Not yet, anyway.

"And how's everyone back home?" he says, clearing his throat a little.

"I think if you really cared how things were back home, you wouldn't have left. If you're that curious about their health, perhaps you can check Facebook, since you don't want to see them."

Right. Right. Fuck. Right.

Yeah, his dad is the guy who read him stories and taught him how to throw a baseball and comforted him through his coming out, but he's also the guy who told John in no uncertain terms that if he was going to throw away his chance at law school admission, he was throwing away the rest of his financial support, too. He's still the guy who said to his baby sister, " _Say goodbye to John, Mel-bell, I don't know when you'll get to see him again._ "

"Thanks, Dad," he spits out before the anger gets too overwhelming for him to speak. "I appreciate that. Well, this has been fun, sorry this isn't going to be a phone call where I come crawling back to you. We should do this again at Christmas. Enjoy the rest of your day."

"John—" his father starts to say with a long-suffering sigh, and John hangs up before he can get anything else out.

He stares down at the phone in his hand, trying to get his thoughts in line. To think he felt bad for his father. To think he felt guilty about leaving.

_Fuck._

He can feel Alex hovering beside him, and he looks up, forcing a smile.

"My dad continues to be a fucking prick, if you were wondering. Just calling because he's going out of town tomorrow and wanted to check in for my birthday."

"That's...not nice," Alex says slowly. He looks concerned and curious both, a blend of questions he's not asking flitting across his face.

"Well, where the definition of 'check in' is more like 'see if I'm ready to beg for forgiveness and then gloat if that's the case,'" John says. Something like understanding peeks through Alex's curiosity. "He wouldn't even tell me how my siblings were doing—he said to check Facebook if I was suddenly so interested in their health. Fuck him."

"Sorry, man," Alex says. He places a tentative hand on John's arm, and John leans heavily into the touch. Encouraged, Alex puts an arm around him and adds, "He's an asshole."

"Yeah." John sighs, a long, tired exhale, and sags against Alex's side. He's an asshole, alright. And one day, John is gonna stop falling for his shit.


	5. Mattie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When John misses a FaceTime date, Martha gives him a call. It's not, however, John that picks up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tumblr request for the gang meeting Martha Manning. I have a much further out story planned for that, so here's this in the mean time.

"Look," the boy on the other end of the phone says, "I wasn't saying that was gonna keep me from doing it, just pointing out a fact."

Martha bites back a smile. "Alex?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry, hi," he says. "Martha. Mattie. Can I call you Mattie? John always calls you Mattie. Or—John calls you Mattie when he's not thinking about it. When he's consciously starting a story about you he always goes, 'My friend Martha,' like this is the first time he's mentioning you. Or—I guess also he's making sure I'm not mixing you up with his sister? But. Anyway. Hi?"

"I really thought he was exaggerating how fast you talk," she says. "It's almost all he's said about you, really. Normally I can't get him to stop talking about his men, but he's coy about you." She stretches out on the settee—she can hear Jo banging around in the kitchen, impatient to go out and meet the rest of their friends.

Across the ocean, John's Alexander is quiet for a moment. She's rather sure this is an uncommon occurrence. "Really?"

"That's how I knew how much he liked you," she says. "He answered all of five questions before changing the subject to badger me about my love life. All I got is a picture and the fact that you're loud and obnoxious and passionate and mean in all the same ways he is, but also very sweet." 

"'Sweet?'"

"And he got all flushed and stammer-y when he said it. Believe me, I've comforted John through quite the parade of terrible boyfriends. He likes you."

"I know," Alex says. She can hear the smile in his voice, the tremor of happiness. "I love him a lot. Like...a lot. Like...."

"A lot?" she suggests.

He snorts. "That's proof, okay? That's solid proof of how much I love him: he's literally the only thing in the fucking world that can leave me speechless. I wrote a fucking essay about the hurricane that destroyed the town I grew up in, I filled an angsty tween journal with my pain when my mom died, every new exciting discovery in my field gets thousands of words of dissection, but then this stupid, beautiful asshole steps in front of me and—bam! All I can do is stare and babble and make like...vague hand gestures."

Martha knows from stammering and vague hand gestures. She glances, unconsciously, at the kitchen again. Jo is standing on a chair to rifle through a high cabinet, scowling with determination. Martha's heart aches.

"So," she says, pushing through her own troubles. "Tell me about you! Like I said, Johnny was vague and secretive." He's told her a little more than she's letting on, but those conversations feel more private, for some reason. _mattie i'm so fucking scared of how much i love him ive only known him for like a month and a half i think Im gonna throw up._

"Uh, I'm twenty-one. I'm in the same program as John. I'm an immigrant from a tiny island in the Caribbean that you've probably never heard of. You've seen pictures, so you know what I look like. I'm pretty smart. I think John has shitty taste in beer and I don't know how he can stand to put those dumb sci-fi movies on when he's working. Um, my favorite color is green?"

"Favorite novel?" she asks.

"Uh, _To Kill a Mockingbird_. Or maybe _White Teeth_? Or _Oscar Wao_? This is a hard question. Uh, John gave me _The Doomsday Book_ , but I haven't read it yet. He also gave me _Guards! Guards!_ and told me if I don't at least appreciate it, he has to break up with me, so I've been putting it off, to be honest."

"Ugh, of course John wants you to start with _Guards_ , he's obsessed with Vimes. Ignore him, if you've never read any Pratchett, start with _Equal Rites_."

"No, tell him to start with _The Amazing Maurice_!" Jo yells from the kitchen. "I mean—I'm not eavesdropping!"

"I barely followed any of that," Alex says. "Is there someone else there?"

"Yeah," Martha says, "my friend Jo is waiting for me to finish up so we can go meet some people. But she's fine waiting until I'm done with you."

"To a point!" Jo shouts, but she's found whatever it was she was looking for in the top cabinet and seems distracted again.

"Anyway," Martha continues, "favorite film?"

"I don't know if I have one? I didn't go to the movies a lot as a kid. Maybe...um—I feel like this is a test."

"It is, to a certain degree," Martha says. "Okay, we'll let you pass on that one. Are you a big partier?"

"I like people, I like socializing. I don't know that I like _partying_. We go out to the bar on Fridays and have a pretty good time. Sometimes we go dancing. As long as it doesn't interfere with my work—I'm kind of a workaholic, but, you know. I make time for my friends. I make time for John. You know we're already dating, right? And like...living together. And while I understand you're close, I'm pretty sure he's not gonna dump me if I don't pass your test. Not that I wouldn't get lost of he did dump me. I mean, unless he was doing one of those dumb self-sacrificing things he does when he's depressed."

And there's the heart of it. He's clearly seen what John can be like when he's down and he's still here and he's pledging to stay through those times. That's all Martha can really ask for. She's an ocean away, he's pushed away his family, and he's all alone somewhere new. She needs to know there's someone on his side. She needs to know that someone is taking care of him when he's too bloody stubborn to take care of himself.

"Well, it's fine because you've passed," she tells him. "Your prize is taking care of Johnny when he's being a pill."

"That's kind of a lousy prize, seeing as how I'm already doing it. But I also get him when he's brilliant and excited, so I guess it evens out."

"Brilliant," Martha repeats. Her smile is downright giddy as she thinks back to all of the idiots John's dated for the past five years.

"So brilliant," Alex says. "And just—passionate. Brilliant and passionate and thoughtful and dedicated and...and...just...fucking radiant. He's just—this is what I was saying, this is what I was telling you, I don't have words, okay?"

"Okay," Martha says, still smiling. "Well, it's been lovely chatting with you, Alex, but I think my friend is going to disassemble my kitchen if we don't leave for the pub soon."

"Yeah, John should be done soon, I can hear him bitching at the doctor from here. Just one last thing—'Johnny?'"

"Did he tell you he covered for me when we were fifteen and pretended to be my boyfriend for a family visit?"

"No..."

Jo is tapping her foot impatiently by the door. They're not even late yet, but that's Jo—insufferable when she's bored. Martha would strangle her if she wasn't so pathetically smitten.

"Very quickly, then—my mother and grandmother were trying to set me up with an eligible boy back home. This was before I had even really admitted to myself that I was gay. So, while I was on the phone with them, panicked, John told me to tell them I already had a boyfriend, which I did, and then when they asked who it was and I panicked more, bless him, he pointed at himself and I told them it was him. Then, of course, when they came to visit for a family week a month or two later, we had to actually pretend to be together. Johnny was out to everyone, so there was a lot of bribery going on that week to keep other students quiet, and he was so very awkward, so everything was over the top." Alex laughs and so does Jo, who's leaning forward against the side of the couch to listen, now. "I called him 'Johnny' in this treacly voice and even after my parents went back to London, it stuck. It was a lifesaver, really—he even fell on his sword and kissed me a few times, which is what really confirmed my lesbianism. You don't have a boy like that kissing you and feel vaguely disgusted if you're even the least bit heterosexual."

Alex laughs again. "Don't I know it."

"So, very long story short, he hated Johnny and declared that only ex-girlfriends get to call him that when Francis and some of our other friends started picking it up, which limits its usage to me."

"Good to know," Alex says. Then, "Hey, baby, you good to go?"

"I've got a script to fill, but fuck that, the ER visit's gonna cost me enough as it is." That's John, unmistakably, and Martha misses him terribly all at once. 

"Don't be an asshole."

"It's just pain stuff. It's basically extra strength Advil, I'll be fine without it."

"Yeah, whatever, don't think I'm not gonna call Mrs. W and get her opinion, because—"

"—are you on my phone?"

"Um."

And then grunts and grappling and muttered curses and then, panicked, "Shit, Mattie?! How long have you been talking to him? What have you told him about me? What the fuck?"

"I'm sorry, darling, Jo and I are late for drinks," Martha says, grinning. "We can make up our FaceTime date tomorrow, yeah?"

"Mattie, I swear to fucking god—"

"I love you, Johnny!"

He's still cursing when she hangs up. Jo's staring at her, one-eyebrow raised, which gives her one last pang of missing John, who shares that genetic quirk.

"Does he get to give your girlfriends the same interrogation?" Jo asks.

"Well, I've not dated anyone seriously enough to find out, yet," Martha says, grabbing her bag and shoving her mobile into the middle pocket. 

"I'm sure you will soon," Jo says, squeezing her arm and leading the way out of the flat and down to the street.

"I'm sure I will," Martha mutters glumly, watching Jo leave for one long, miserable second before she grabs her coat and follows.


	6. Cryptids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During a boring night in, Herc tells a story that can't possibly be true. (Probably.)

When John returns from the kitchen with four fresh beers, Alex and Lafayette are doubled over laughing while Herc scowls at them.

"Did I miss something good?" he asks. He passes a bottle to Herc, who grabs it with a glare, and another to Laf, who almost drops it because he's laughing so hard, and then sits down next to Alex on the couch and passes the third one his way.

"You'll never fucking believe this," Alex says, shaking his head. "Herc believes in _cryptids_."

John doesn't mean for the snort of laughter to be quite so loud.

"Oh, fuck off, Laurens," Herc says. "Fuck all y'all, actually."

"Cryptids?" John asks. "Do you also believe in aliens abducting people to run secret tests in their UFOs?"

Herc flips them all off with one hand while he takes a long swig of beer with the other. John probably shouldn't be surprised—Herc is definitely the least traditional of their team. Sure, John and Alex and Laf seem a little weird and progressive to their friends who have strictly studied parapsych from an American perspective, but their styles are pretty firmly planted in established methods of study. Alex is a little mix of everything, John's solidly Western European and Scandinavian, thanks to summers in Denmark, and Laf is a mish-mash of all of Europe. Herc, though—Herc's ideas and methods are cobbled together from all over the place. There are things that he does that John can't trace back to _anywhere_. They work—Herc is crazy smart. He's a tech whiz and he's calm in a crisis and he can read people better than anyone John's ever met. He can talk to anyone, fit in anywhere, learn anything—but some of the stuff he learns is weird as hell.

So, yeah, if any of their friends are going to believe in cryptids, it's gonna be Herc.

"Look," Herc says, gesturing towards them with his beer bottle, "I'm not saying fucking Bigfoot is gonna wander out of the woods and ask for a cup of sugar. ¹ I'm saying there's stuff that can't be explained by parapsych, stuff that can't be spirits."

Alex leans against John's shoulder and does a poor job smothering another giggle. "Bro, you sound like you're on one of those shitty SyFy Channel 'reality' shows about 'The Search For the Chupacabra' or whatever. There's just no way cryptids are real!"

"Yeah, well, my cousin fucking saw the Jersey Devil, so fuck you very much," Herc says. That just sends Alex off into another fit of laughing, burying his head in John's shoulder. John tries very hard to swallow back his own laughter, but he's not one hundred percent successful.

"Herc, that's the most Jersey thing I've ever heard you say, and I once saw you get into a fight with an old lady over the Statue of Liberty," John says. He pets Alex's hair absently and takes a drink of his beer while he can—who knows when Herc is going to say something else that will have them all cracking up again.

"I don't care how old that lady was, she was telling those kids it was in New York and that's a fucking lie!" He points accusingly at John, as if it was John who had besmirched his homeland. "Look at a fucking map ² ."

"The Jersey Devil?" Alex says again. He snuggles further into John's shoulder because this is Three Beer Alex, so he's starting to get just tipsy enough to eschew debate for cuddling.

"Yeah," Herc says. He leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, getting closer to them. "It was, like, fuck, almost a decade ago now. Jay and his girl and their friends were headed down the shore after their prom and I guess there was traffic on the Turnpike, so they end up taking these back roads and shit. Get totally lost, end up in the Pine Barrens. It's the middle of the fucking night and dark as dicks, obviously. This was before smartphones and shit, so they pull over to look at a map."

"Is this gonna be like the fucking hook for a hand serial killer story?" Alex asks.

"Ssssh!" Laf murmurs, and Alex, miraculously, closes his mouth.

It helps that Herc's a great storyteller—there's something about his voice, his presence that commands attention and then pins it there. Laf has gone totally silent, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring up at Herc with wide eyes. Alex's arms are still wrapped around John, but his chin is hooked over John's shoulder so he can see Herc more clearly.

"Anyway," Herc says, giving Alex a Look. "They're looking at this stupid map, arguing over where they made the wrong turn, when they notice that the crickets and bugs and animals and shit—they've all gone quiet. You could hear a fucking pin drop in that forest. The four of them, they get quiet too. Jay gets this weird feeling and starts trying to get them all to get back in the car so they can just turn around and retrace their steps, but they hear something in the woods and his dumbass buddy stops them and shines the flashlight into the trees."

Herc puts his beer bottle down and sits up a little. John _knows_ he's playing the three of them like a cheap fiddle, but he can't help but lean in a little closer.

"They see something sweep through the underbrush, like a tail, right? Jay's still trying to get them to get back in the fucking car. He feels sick all of a sudden, and so does his girlfriend. She starts trying to get them back in the car too, but their jackass friend just starts wandering into the trees to see what it is. Jay wants to leave them, but the friend's girlfriend follows him into the woods and Jay's girlfriend doesn't want to leave her, so soon Jay is rushing after them, begging them to turn around."

Herc pauses and picks up his beer bottle with exaggerated slowness. He takes a long drink while Lafayette, Alex, and John stare at him. He's such a fucking shithead.

He puts the bottle back down and leans forward again. "They hear something ahead of them in the woods—it's the only thing they hear, the rest of the wildlife is still fucking silent. There's a noise like a goat bleating and suddenly Jay's fucking friend decides he's seen enough. He turns around and he starts to run, so Jay and the girls follow after him. And they can hear something following them, something else running behind them, thumping and crashing through the trees and brush. One of the girls screams that something touched her and they finally hit the road again and pile back into the car. And Jay's friend starts the engine and the lights flicker on and there, standing at the edge of the trees, is some fucking monster with long, spindly legs and a goat's head and fucking hoofs and wings. ³ And it looks at them and then takes off in the air, over to the other side of the road and then out of sight. They swing the car around and fucking floor it and try to find the Turnpike again. And Jay—he keeps getting that sick feeling and every time he does he looks out the window and sees a shadow flying over the tops of the trees, following them the whole way out of the woods."

Herc leans back against the chair and crosses his arms, grinning smugly at the three of them. They're frozen in place and it takes John a few solid blinks to remember that they're in the living room, listening to a story.

"That's it?" Lafayette asks.

"Fucking—'that's it?'" Herc says. "I tell you about the fucking Jersey Devil stalking my damn cousin and that's not good enough for you?"

"It was probably just some weird bird," Alex says. "You know—there's some big bird that people think gets mistaken for the Jersey Devil, right? ⁴ " Alex may sound dismissive, but John can feel the beat of his heart against his back, quicker than usual. He can feel the way Alex's grip on his waist is a little too tight.

"Fuck all you shitheads," Herc says. "You'll believe in ghosts, but not in the possibility of there being some kind of animal or whatever out there that we've never seen?"

"Ghosts are documentable," John says.

"Ghosts are _science_ ," Alex says, which is basically the same thing. "Cryptids are fairytales."

"I'll show you a fucking fairytale," Herc says. He moves to stand and Alex immediately ducks behind John, wiggling to squish himself between John's back and the back of the couch.

"Hey, now," John says, even though he knows Herc's just menacing for the sake of it. "If anyone's gonna pin my boyfriend down and torture him, it's gonna be me."

"You tell him, babe." Alex's voice is muffled by the couch. "But, for the record, I am perfectly capable of fighting my own battles, but it's really sexy when you fight them for me. Also, Herc's a lot bigger than me."

John rolls his eyes. Herc does too.

"Can we please talk about something else?" Lafayette asks. "We are nearly four drinks into the night and have a limited amount of time before Alexander and John abandon us to tear each other's clothes off."

Four Beer Alex _is_ pretty horny.

"Fine, fine," Herc says. He settles back into the arm chair and Alex climbs out from behind John, nestling up against him instead. He picks up his beer and tucks his arm around John's waist and under his shirt, his palm pressed against the sharp bone of John's hip. "What the fuck was up with Washington last night?"

They tip over into conversation about Washington, Burr, and some other department gossip. As Laf predicted, by the end of his fourth beer, Alex has abandoned the conversation all together to whisper increasingly dirty promises and demands into John's ear. They excuse themselves not long after, swaying slightly as they walk towards their room. Alex closes the door and John goes over to the dresser to dig out a new box of condoms when something outside the open window catches his eye. He pauses, turns to peer out through the screen. 

At first, he doesn't see anything—it's just the gazebo, the picnic tables, the edge of the parking lot and the bushes. But then, just as he's turning away, it's there again. He can't make it out fully—it's large and lurking in the shadows and—

His eyes are playing tricks on him. Four Beer John's got a pretty short attention span and all of his blood is currently headed south and he just—he's just seeing weird things. That's all. There's—there's nothing down there in the shadows.

"Baby, come on—my dick is lonely," Alex calls from the bed. John rips his attention away from the window and looks over at Alex, flushed and happy and half-undressed and endlessly inviting. Right. This is what he needs to focus on—not some weird shadow that's probably nothing.

Outside, there's a noise. It's not unlike the bleat of a goat.

John slams the window down and locks it, then tugs the shade down so quickly he almost pulls it off the wall.

It was probably nothing. It was definitely nothing. 

But. Better safe than sorry, right?

* * *

¹ [Sort of a thing.](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/376261743852870957/)

² [This is true.](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Statue+of+Liberty+National+Monument/@40.6892494,-74.0445004,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x40c6a5770d25022b!8m2!3d40.6892494!4d-74.0445004) Don't let any goddamn New Yorkers tell you otherwise. 

³ [The first illustration of the Jersey Devil is endearingly goofy as hell.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Jersey_Devil_Philadelphia_Post_1909.jpg)

⁴ [The big dumb bird people claim inspired/s the Jersey Devil stories.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhill_crane)


	7. someday soon we all will be together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lafayette's family is split on either side of an ocean, and he can't be two places at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a timestamp request for Lafayette's thoughts during [we'll have to muddle through somehow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9122476).

Gilbert wakes up to two texts on Saturday morning.

_three days!!! xxxA_ , says the first.

_FAKE BABY BROTHER!!! I just got in. Mom's dragging us to brunch at eleven and you need to be there!,_ says the second.

Gilbert pulls a pillow over his head. Maybe if he just ignores both of them, all of his problems will disappear.

He manages to block out the world until his alarm goes off at quarter to ten, but if he wants to meet the Washingtons for brunch, he needs to get out of bed eventually.

He does want to meet them. He wants to see Patsy and be doted on by Martha and see George laugh at Patsy's terrible jokes. But they're going to go home and decorate for Christmas and be together and Gilbert is going to come back to his apartment and pack his bags for France and everything is just _so much_ today. He doesn't want to do any of it.

He malingers in bed for another few moments, but ultimately accepts that he should spend what little time he can spare with George and Martha and Patsy before his flight next week. That means getting up, getting dressed, leaving the house, putting on a smile.

He trudges out to the kitchen and can hear John and Alexander before he even turns the corner. They're talking too softly for him to make out the words, but he immediately recognizes that sly, flirtatious tone. It's how they nearly always talk to each other, like there's no one else in the room, no one else in the universe.

It's stupid to be mad at them. There's nothing to be mad about. They're in their own apartment, spending time together. That's not against the rules, just because Gilbert is tied up in knots over Adrienne and the Washingtons and the holidays and the endless length of the Atlantic Ocean.

He tries to tell himself this as he marches into the kitchen, squeezing past them, but he still mutters, "No sex in the kitchen" as he walks by.

"We're not having sex!" Alexander insists, but Gilbert doesn't miss the way he presses himself back against John and reaches up to play with his hair. It's so incredibly childish to be mad about that. He tries to swallow it down.

"Then please continue not having sex," he says and finally spots a banana on the counter and a carton of muffins in the cabinet. Plenty to tide him over until brunch in a few hours.

"We're gonna have so much sex in the kitchen while he's in France," Alexander whispers. John nuzzles his neck and he laughs and it's just not fair. It's not fair of them to get to be like that, it's not fair for him to judge them for it, and the hot, stifling anger that's pressing up against his chest and throat isn't fair, either, but it's too late to stop it.

"I'm not in France yet," he says, and leaves the kitchen without coffee. He's afraid of what will happen if he waits long enough for it to brew. He doesn't want to alienate John and Alexander, especially since his issues aren't their fault.

He ignores Adrienne's text and sends Patsy a quick, _see you there,_ and tries not to think about anything as he eats his banana and then slowly gets dressed for the day. He doesn't know why he's being so dramatic. He wishes he could turn that part of his brain, his heart, off for at least a little while. He'll only be gone a month—less than that, really—and he'll be with Adrienne. Adrienne is one of the people he loves most in the world and he hasn't seen her in six months! He can stand to be away from the people he sees every day long enough to visit with her.

He keeps repeating that to himself, forcing himself to concentrate so hard on his mantra that he doesn't have time to think about anything else. He finishes getting dressed and does his hair and washes his face. He squeezes past Alexander and John being irritatingly enamored with each other. He puts on his coat and goes down to his car and cranks up the music on his phone as loud as he dares for the short drive to the Washingtons' house.

Being around the Washingtons is suitably distracting. Patsy throws herself at him in a tackling hug, even though she just saw him a few weeks ago, and Martha hugs him like he didn't have dinner with her last night. They all pile into one car to go for brunch, talking and squabbling and laughing and it's like a family, a real family. A family that he made on his own, not out of legal obligation, but because they all just genuinely like him, just as he genuinely likes them.

He's fine through brunch. He's even fine on the drive after, right up until Patsy looks at him with no small amount of distress and says, "Is this the last time I'm going to see you before the summer?"

He doesn't mean to get teary and he knows Patsy didn't mean to cause his grief, but soon they're both sniffling and hugging in the living room, with George standing awkwardly in the doorway and Martha fretting around both of them, promising that there will be at least once family dinner before Gilbert leaves, and Patsy will come with them to drive him to the airport, won't she?

It's just one holiday. It's not even a holiday that he liked all that much as a child. But it means something to Martha and it means something to Patsy and Gilbert can't help but feel like he's ruining it by running back to France to see a girl who probably doesn't even love him the way he loves her. And even if she does, is this the rest of his life? Flying between America and Paris, living with Adrienne and missing his family, being with his family and missing his love? Why can't it be easy? Why can't everyone just be together, in one place, so he could have everyone he needs when he needs them?

He tries to put himself together in the car before he goes upstairs to the apartment. He hesitates, even, and considers calling Hercules and seeing if he wants to get a drink. He loves John and Alexander, but he doesn't know that he can stomach seeing them right now, easily in love, _carelessly_ in love.

Hercules doesn't pick up. Upstairs it is.

He manages to stop crying by the time he reaches the door. When he lets himself in, John and Alexander are quiet, curled together on the couch and watching a movie, casually pressed together under a pile of blankets so it's impossible to tell where one of them ends and the other begins.

He swallows against the lump in his throat. He's not sure if it's more tears or anger that John and Alexander don't deserve.

"Hey, Laf." John is speaking very carefully. Gilbert's mask must not be as good as he hoped it would be. "What's up?"

He shrugs and busies himself pulling his phone out of his pocket, squeezing it and focusing on keeping his mind clear.

"We're watching some puppets do _A Christmas Carol_ ," Alex says.

"I know you're purposely saying 'puppets' instead of 'Muppets' to bait me," John says, and tucks some of Alex's hair back behind his ear nonchalantly.

"Slander!" Alex exclaims. He leans into the touch. Gilbert doesn't think he even realizes he's doing it.

And it's not fair, it's not fair to them, but it's not fair to _him_ either. It's not fair that he's loved Adrienne for his whole life and she's an ocean away, while John stumbles into a boy at a bar and can have him whenever he wants. It's not fair that he's drowning in quiet, careful longing all the time while Alexander can accidentally say 'I love you' over the comms when they're working, like it's not a big deal. It's not fair that he can, in theory, have the person he wants most, if not for the endless miles and indeterminate years that will separate them.

It's not fair to them and it's not fair to him, and he shouldn't be angry but his blood is rushing past his ears and he thinks he's going to choke on the scream building up in his chest.

"You should join us," John says, oblivious to Gilbert's struggle.

"Yeah, it's Christmas. I'm under the impression this is the time of year when cuddling sappily with your loved ones is encouraged." Alex holds open the corner of the blanket invitingly. They're just trying to help. And yet—

"I'm not interested in playing your sex games," he snaps. He says it all the time, makes a joke of it. He appreciates them aesthetically and has never been particularly attracted to men, so it's easy to tease them about living with them, about sex, about their intentions.

This isn't teasing, and he knows it the minute the words leave his mouth. They don't deserve it, but it's not as bad as some of the things he could have said, some of the things he wanted to say.

"Hey, no sex involved," Alex says. "We're totally G-rated. We're just cuddling, bro."

At least he's not trying to turn it into a fight, thank god. Gilbert doesn't know that he could have a fight without bursting into self-pitying tears. "I have things to do," he says, without snapping this time. He turns and heads to this room and makes it all the way inside before he starts to cry again.

Fuck, but it's going to be a long month of never being where he wants to be. A long lifetime of it. He should get used to it now.


	8. Body Shots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Alex's birthday and early enough in the evening that there are no bad decisions, just decisions that future!John will have to deal with in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for a timestamp meme on tumblr. Someone requested the body shots from [Birthday Shots](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9292676), so here we are!

Molly was the one who wanted body shots and she was the one who forked the money over to Maggie at the bar for free reign of the bottle of tequila and John wants to tell her that she's so pretty (for a girl) and she doesn't have to make up dumb reasons to kiss girls she should just go for it and she didn't have to pay but he's glad she did because he's not sure what he did with his wallet and—

He wants to tell her a lot of things, but they're all distant now, muted, a list his mind is making for later, because right now there's Alex and a salt shaker and a lime wedge and a bottle of tequila and that's really just...the main attraction. So to speak.

There are a lot of people cheering and wolf whistling and John smirks at them as he has Alex sit cross-legged on top of the table and then wedges a shot glass down against his crotch. Molly hands him the tequila and he fills up the glass and then takes a swig from the bottle and winces because, fuck, right, he hates straight tequila. He tries to shake it off and presses the lime wedge between Alex's teeth. Alex is staring at him with deep, dark, hungry eyes and John is frozen, for a moment, with his fingers on Alex's lips and Alex's eyes burning a hole into him and making his stomach flip and—

"Shots!" someone yells—a stranger, John doesn't know who—and he blinks and remembers he's in the middle of vaguely exhibitiony pseudo-sex act. Normally not his kink, not at all, but he's got more vodka in his body than brains at the moment and he's reached the point of drunkenness where he doesn't care what's going on outside of the bubble of John-and-Alex.

He brushes Alex's hair aside gently, traces his fingers over the skin and feels him tremble. Of course Alex wants him, Alex always wants him, it's the one thing that John is always sure of, but it's still nice to see it in action in front of a crowd of people. He moves close and breathes against Alex's throat and then licks. Alex's pulse jumps and his shoulders shudder with a sharp intake of breath. A few shakes of salt and then, after pausing so the crowd can cheer him on, he licks up the salt, leans over and takes the shot glass between his teeth, throws his head back, swallows the shot. It burns going down, and he winces again, but only for a second, because then he's tossing the shot glass aside and leaning in to take the lime between his teeth, his mouth sealed over Alex's for much, much longer than it takes to suck on the lime.

There's more cheering when he pulls away, flushed and suddenly wishing everyone would just go away so he could climb on top of Alex and—

"Hey, hey, hey!" says the girl Molly wants to get with, some stranger they met on the way to the Frog. "If you gonna do fucking body shots like a goddamn tourist on spring break, you gotta do 'em right! None of this shot glass shit."

More general agreement from the crowd and John can't remember if all the randos are people they invited off the street or just regular bar patrons who got pulled into the crowd. Alex has that effect on people. Alex just pulls everyone into his orbit, makes everyone want to go where he's going and do what he's doing and _fuck_ John just...loves him. He just fucking _loves_ Alex, fucking out-of-his-mind loves him.

The random girl makes Alex lay back and pulls up his shirt. Alex laughs nervously, the fluttery little laugh he gets in anticipation of John touching him. It's a laugh that goes straight to John's dick or his heart or maybe both. 

"Stay still," John murmurs, stroking his hand across Alex's stomach. The muscles jump under his hand and Alex's breath hitches in his lungs. The fluttery laugh returns when John leans over to lick his throat and gets distracted, kissing and biting that soft, warm place where Alex's neck meets his shoulder, right over the ghost of a mark he left a few days ago.

Salt, then Alex sucks the lime juice off of John's fingers as he presses a wedge between Alex's lips, and then the girl he doesn't know is carefully pouring tequila into Alex's navel. Alex quivers when John sucks the salt off of him, and John's amazed the tequila doesn't go spilling down his stomach. He doesn't give it another opportunity, sucking it up and delighting in the sounds Alex is making and the way his body jerks and the taste of his skin and the joy of making Alex squirm.

He rests his hand on Alex's thigh as he stretches to kiss the lime out of his mouth, and Alex gasps against his lips. He presses the lime into John's mouth with his tongue so his teeth are free to nip John's lower lip and, fuck, but John really want to be somewhere he can touch Alex's dick right now.

They pull apart, flushed, breathing heavy, and then hands are urging Alex off the table and pushing John into his place and having Alex's mouth on his navel won't be nearly as good as having it on his cock, but it won't be _bad_ either.

Alex takes his time pushing John's shirt up, dragging his nails against John's abs, digging his thumbs into the flesh. Showing off, because John's pretty hot and Alex likes to brag. He lets John suck on his thumb for a moment before he shifts a new lime wedge into his mouth, then licks the hollow of this throat, his breath hot and heavy and making John just as lightheaded as the drinks and the heat and the arousal coursing through him. 

When Alex gets up, he moves to stand between John's legs, which isn't precisely the standard positioning for body shots, but John immediately sees the appeal. The same girl as before pours tequila into John's navel and he tries not to jump at the sudden cool tickle. A little of it drips down his side, and that's where Alex starts, licking the trail it leaves behind, then sucking on John's navel. His teeth drag against the skin and John shakes and resists the urge to buck up against the heat of Alex's body. He has to lean over the length of John to get to the salt, pressing them tightly together, and John really, _really_ sees the appeal of this position. Alex grinds his hips down while he licks the hollow of John's throat and when he moves for the lime, John can't help it—he wraps his arms and legs around Alex and pushes him up and then Alex is lifting him, swinging him off the table with some kind of preternatural birthday strength considering he usually can't carry a stack of books more than a few feet without complaining.

He can hear someone wolf-whistling and someone else climbing up onto the table for the next round of body shots and the music playing in the background and laughter and mostly his own blood rushing past his ears as Alex stumbles around until he can press John up against a pillar and finally release some of his weight. They're still kissing and the lime is still in John's mouth and John's working on a line about lime juice and blow jobs when the music changes and Alex nearly drops him, he pulls away so fast.

"I love this song!" he shouts, and pulls an unsteady John towards the impromptu dance floor.

"But I was going to suck your dick!" John says, spitting out the lime as he stumbles to follow.

"You can suck my dick anytime, this song is only playing now!" Alex says, only slurring the words a little. "It's my _birthday_. You have to do what I say!"

"If you want to play like that, you just have to ask nicely," John says, the words thick in his mouth as he tries to enunciate them and walk at the same time and, wow, he hit a wall, he hit a drunken tequila wall, he hit the wall where he's had enough tequila to be drunk, a three-drinks-in-town-and-five-rounds-of-shots-and-then-tequila drunken wall, next level drunk, drunker than stumbling down the streets of Morristown, waiting for an Uber, telling strangers to come to Alex's birthday party.

"I wanna dance!" Alex says, and he grins like the _sun_ because he's _beautiful_ and _bright_ and John _loves him_ and John will do _whatever he wants_ because, fuck, it's _Alex_.

"I think I'm drunk!" John says.

"Me too!"

"Like...drunker...drunker drunk!"

"I love you," Alex tells him seriously. "Your...face. I love it. And the rest of you. Your mind—you can totally suck my dick later, because I love you so much and I want you to be happy and that makes me happy too—"

Alex is shouting a little to be heard over the music. A few people are looking at them. John doesn't care. John doesn't care about anything but Alex. And maybe sucking his dick later. He maybe cares about that.

"I love you and sucking your dick," John replies, just as serious.

"I love this _song_!" Alex exclaims again and laughs and then John laughs and it's a good night. It's such a good night! What a good idea this was, to go out and do these things! They have the best ideas!


	9. regroup and research and think

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A timestamp of Washington's PoV at the very end of [the air grows cold around me and you.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8404849/chapters/19258192)

Not long after they reach the highway, George hears a quiet _clunk_ from the backseat. A quick glance in the rearview mirror confirms his suspicions—Hamilton's fallen asleep, his chin tipped downward against his chest, his phone slipped out of his hand and somewhere on the floor. Laurens has been asleep nearly since they got in the car, closing his eyes against imminent car sickness and passing out not much later.

George turns down the radio to a quiet murmur now that it's not doubling as a privacy bubble for the boys. He usually chooses his music as a quiet distraction, something he can get lost in. Right now, he wants to be _present_. After everything that happened this weekend, he'd like to be rooted in the here and now for the foreseeable future.

And what _did_ happen? For all of his years in this field, pulling apart the secrets of parapsychology, unraveling this mysteries of the things that exist beyond the world as it's known, he can't make sense of the things that happened in that house. There's no earthly explanation for their quiet monitors coupled with an entity strong enough to cause the kind of damage that plaguing them. There's no explanation for their strange symptoms—Silas' irritability, the noises George was hearing, Hamilton's exhaustion, and Laurens'—

He looks in the rearview mirror again. Laurens' head is tipped onto Hamilton's shoulder. He looks peaceful, but the bags under his eyes are still prominent and his color hasn't entirely returned yet. Laurens is brash and foolhardy and takes too many risks. He doesn't flinch away from a fight, and yet that's what he was doing all weekend. He was scared. He was scared in a way that none of the rest of them were.

He has some thoughts about that boy and his intuition, but this isn't the time to make wild suppositions, not when he's still hours from home and without any sort of research to back up his thoughts. No, for now he'll let Laurens rest. Hamilton, too—Hamilton is fiercely, excessively protective. He worries more than Martha and it takes very little to put him on the defensive where his friends are concerned. George needs to wait and regroup and research and _think_. Once he has an idea, a hypothesis, _then_ he can bring it up to Laurens, to Hamilton.

The boys will rest, for now. There are half a dozen distressing mysteries that they've uncovered over this weekend away—he can focus on some of the other ones for the time being.


	10. Rain Delay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When their plans get cancelled due to the weather, John convinces Alex there's no reason not to stay in bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for a prompt for "John getting Alex to stay in bed and cuddle."

Alex wakes up not to his alarm, but to John humming a song that he can almost place. He stretches lazily, nuzzling John's shoulder. John is warm—he always is, he's like Alex's own personal hot water bottle—and he raises his hand to stroke Alex's hair once he settles.

"You're up early," Alex mumbles. Alex usually has to shake John awake, even after two alarms, and even that doesn't work sometimes.

"Mm, no," John says. "I'm up late, actually."

"What?" Alex's mind wrestles with all the words in that sentence, struggling to make sense out of them. He opens his eyes and rapidly tries to blink the sleep out of them."What's—we have the—the thing?"

"Ssssh," John murmurs. Alex quiets more out of confusion than anything else. It's too early to be playing games, but after a moment he hears it—rain falling gently outside.

"They cancelled it?"

"Make-up is tomorrow afternoon," John says.

The burst of adrenaline that snapped Alex out of his sleepy daze has him automatically sitting up and moving to get out of bed. John grabs his shoulder and pulls him right back down before he can even push the covers back.

"I have shit to do," Alex says, but John holds him in place.

"No you don't," he says. "You _had_ shit to do—we were supposed to be on that trip all day. You had nothing else planned. You can stay still for a minute."

Alex flops back into bed and sighs. "I can still be getting a million things done today."

"I know," John says. Alex glances at him absently and then does a double-take. John looks...tired. "But, come on. Just for a little while, stay with me?"

John is absolutely the worst. John is a targeted weapon of mass destruction against him. John is the quickest way to cut his legs out from under him. Because John is Alex's biggest weakness. There is very little he wouldn't do for John—it should be embarrassing, the way he'll grind to a stop, the way he'll give in so easily to the stupidest requests, but he can't help it. They joke all the time about how unhealthy their relationship is, but they joke because they recognize the truth of it—they have too much power over each other. It's not entirely good or fair or right.

But that's not the issue today. The issue today is that Alex is itching to work, but John looks tired and a little lost. John was quieter than usual last night, John sometimes gets depressed, and on a day when they don't actually have any commitments, Alex can't say no to such a simple request.

He shifts on the bed, rolls onto his side to get comfortable. The sound of the rain outside is soothing and John looks relieved to have him settling back into the pillows. They're almost nose to nose like this. Alex reaches finds John's hand under the blankets.

"Hey," he says.

"Hi," John says. "Thanks."

"This isn't, like...the worst thing," Alex admits. John laughs, then inches forward. He tucks his head under Alex's chin and embraces Alex with a long, quiet exhale, more breath than sigh. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just...really tired today," John says. "I'm glad the thing got cancelled—the idea of getting my shit together and getting over to the school and then wrangling all those kids off-campus...it's exhausting."

"Yeah." Alex runs his fingers through John's hair, gently untangling his bedhead. He can feel John relaxing against him little by little. "But this is nice?"

"Yeah. This is nice. Did you read that stupid _Guardian_ editorial last night?"

"Mmhm."

"Did you already write a response?"

"It's scheduled to go up at ten our time, 3pm London time. I hate when people who don't understand parapsych decide to write about parapsych."

"Yeah. Do you have your phone? You should read it to me."

Alex can't see John's face, so odds are John can't see the embarrassingly fond look that passes over Alex's face. Sometimes, when Alex can't turn his brain off, he has John read to him. Usually it's in German, so Alex can focus on the calming cadence of his voice and not get distracted by the words themselves. He does it because he loves the sound of John's voice and hearing John is comforting in a way he can't quite articulate. The idea that John feels the same way about him is...well, Alex falls a little more in love with John every day and today he's getting an early start.

Alex has to stretch his arm as far as he can manage to grab his glasses and his phone from his side of the bed, and when he does, he settles back against John, shifting around until he can comfortably cuddle and read at the same time.

" _I'm sure by now you've all seen the mainstream media's latest attempt to write-off a science they don't understand,_ " he reads, and John chuckles against his chest. " _I'm talking, of course, about the editorial in the_ Guardian _addressing the required qualifications of certified Investigative Parapsychologists...._ "

The room is warm and quiet as he reads, with only his voice and the soft patter of rain echoing into the silence of the apartment. He's relaxed and comfortable and, sure, there may be six dozen things he could be doing right now, but his responsibilities can wait. For the moment, this is what's important—a day off, a warm cocoon of blankets, and his boyfriend curled against him in the grey light of a quiet, rainy morning.


	11. Two Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's juggling two secrets--his fake relationship with Mattie and the relationship he _wants_ with Francis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a timestamp meme: "John in boarding school."

John kisses Mattie's cheek and says, "See you later. I love you." He puts on his most syrupy sweet smile, the one that made all the ladies at the country club swoon back in South Carolina. Mattie's mother doesn't swoon, exactly, but she does seem begrudgingly pleased, which is a win, as far as he's concerned.

He stands in the entry to his dorm, waving goodbye until Mattie and the Mannings are out of sight. He's careful to close the door behind him before he rolls his eyes and snorts. The common room is mostly empty—the majority of people seem to be at the various Family Week festivities. John's family, thankfully, has once again elected not to visit him this week, so he has the common room to himself.

"Hey, Johnny."

Well, mostly to himself. He's torn between the embarrassing, earnest grin that always fights to take over his face whenever Francis is around and scowling at the nickname.

"Don't call me that," he says. He flops onto the sofa. "Only Mattie can get away with that, and only when I'm pretending to be her boyfriend."

"I still can't believe that they bought that." Francis sits next to him on the sofa and John's entire body vibrates silently. This stupid crush on his best friend is getting out of control—there are plenty of other hot guys on campus and the fact that he and Francis do almost everything together means he's buzzing self-consciously 24/7.

"I'm not that, like...." He gestures vaguely. "You know. Obviously gay."

"No," Francis says, "But you two have an entirely different type of chemistry. You're like siblings—it's clear you're incredibly close, but it's also clear that you don't think of each other that way."

"She's my best friend," John agrees. "Well—I mean, her and—you." He winces. It seems the past few months he can't help but trip over his tongue constantly in front of Francis. He's an awkward mess.

Francis chuckles, soft and warm, and John suddenly realizes how close they are. Inches apart, really, though they have the whole sofa to spread out on. Francis is propped on his shoulder, facing John, smiling a little.

"We have a different kind of chemistry," Francis says with bedroom eyes and John thinks his brain is about to short-circuit.

"Wait, is this—are you—" John waves at the space between them. "You're not—are you?"

Francis grins and leans in and kisses him and then all bets are off. John doesn't care if this is a joke or a dare or a passing fancy—he's gonna make the most of it, and if nothing else, he'll have enough material to jerk off to for the rest of his life.

"I'm not—" Francis says, breathless, when he pulls away. "I mean—no one knows. No one can know."

"Got it," John says, grabbing his uniform tie and pulling him back in.

"Mattie, maybe, if she can be quiet, but it's—it's not like you've been before—"

"Yeah, yeah, sure, it's a secret, I get it, _why are we not kissing_?"

Francis allows himself to be pulled down again and kisses back with gusto, but before they can get too much further, the door to the common room slams open. Francis launches himself to the other side of the couch so fast that John is afraid he has whiplash. Luckily, the new occupant of the common room doesn't even come in far enough to see them—it's a boy from the year below them, and he grabs an umbrella from the shelves by the door and then races out again without even turning around.

Francis is breathing hard, eyes wide. John's brain and boner both are so delighted it's hard to notice what else is going on.

"Let's go upstairs!" John blurts out before Francis can do something stupid like say _this was a mistake_ or _it's too dangerous, let's never do that again_. "In our room! With the door! That locks!" Ish. The locks on these old doors aren't the best, and the other eight guys who live in their suite aren't great about privacy, but they'll be out for ages, yet. Family Week festivities are going on all day, Francis and John are alone, John hasn't had a boyfriend in _months_ , and it turns out his massively unwieldy crush is reciprocated. He'd be an idiot not to take advantage of this convergence of events.

"Okay," Francis says, tentatively. "I—as long as you're okay with it being a secret. It has to be, John. No one can find out."

"Yeah, yeah, that's great, that's _fine_ , we _could be kissing right now._ " 

Francis rolls his eyes, but his grin is giddy as he follows John up the stairs and into their dorm room, the door locking quietly behind them.


	12. Fireflies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is reckless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone prompted _I think I've got fireflies where my caution should be (instead of slowing down, I just shine brighter)_ , which is from [strip 938 of A Softer World](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=938).

Everything at the exorcism is going fine until it's not.

Herc's muttering incantations and Laf's drawing runes on the ground and Burr's burning different combinations of chemicals and Alex is ordering everyone around and it's the sort of chaos that's really business as usual. Until John turns and sees a second entity, or at least a second shape. It's inching along the wall, a shadow of a shadow on the clear opposite side of the room from the spirit they've cornered for their ritual. It's moving towards their electrical set-up and John doesn't pause to think. He jumps out of the ring of salt spread on the ground, the one protecting them from harm. He runs for their set-up, another container of salt already in his hand because they don't _need_ that equipment to finish this, sure, but all that data...he can't just watch as they lose all that data.

It doesn't help that it's lab equipment—any damage comes out of their paychecks, and they really can't spare a thousand dollars in repairs.

Of course, his movement catches the attention of both of the spirits in the room. It's a race to the equipment and John shakes a salt circle around it as quickly as he can manage. He miscalculates and there's not enough to finish so he drops to his knees just as the shadows are converging on him and spreads the salt he's already poured out, using his fingers to connect either open edge of the circle just in time. There's not really enough space for him to move around, the circle is so tight, and with Herc shouting, now, and Laf muttering to himself and the unearthly wind whipping through the room, it's not until the lights flicker again and the spirits are gone for good that John manages to get his bearings again.

The room is quiet in the aftermath of the exorcism, and John groans a little as he pushes himself to his feet, resting his weight on the audio mixer to steady himself. He hears Herc mutter a curse and Laf let out a long sigh and finally turns around again.

"You're a fucking maniac, Laurens, you know that?" Herc says, stretching and rolling his shoulders.

"We've been staking this house out for three days, there's no goddamn way I'm letting us lose all that data, especially not when it's on a thousand bucks worth of lab equpiment," John says with a shrug.

"Yeah, well, good job, man," Herc says.

John wipes his palms on his thighs and looks up again to see what needs to be done to start packing up. His eyes fall immediately on Alex and he freezes.

Alex's complexion has gone pale and grey, his eyes wide, his hands wrapped in fists around the recorder in his hand, so tight that his knuckles are white.

"Alex?" he asks softly.

"Laurens! Help me get these cameras down!" Herc calls over from the corner. John turns automatically to look at him, and when he turns back to Alex, he's already directed his attention elsewhere, bent over a box and packing away equipment.

He brushes off the encounter and helps Herc with the cameras. He nearly forgets about it entirely as they load all of their equipment into Herc's van and then go their separate ways home for the evening—Herc back to his apartment, Burr to campus, Laf to their apartment in his car, and John and Alex in John's. He's exhausted—they're all exhausted, he's sure. It's late, they have work and class and paperwork waiting for them in the morning, and exorcisms always zap all his energy.

If Alex is quieter than usual, he doesn't think much about it as they come inside and go through the motions of getting ready for bed. He's a little confused when Alex climbs into bed after him, spooning up against his back, but while it's uncommon for Alex to go to bed at the same time he does, it's not unprecedented.

"I love you," Alex whispers fiercely against the back of his neck.

"I love you too," John says around a yawn. He wants to ask if something's wrong—there was an edge to Alex's tone, a frenetic energy that seemed out of place whispered in their bed as they curled up to sleep for the night. John is tired, though, and his brain is already full of a running tally of what he has to do in the morning. He'll ask Alex about it in the morning, if he remembers. If he doesn't...well, Alex isn't one to hide his feelings away. If it's important, he'll bring it up.

*

John's not normally the type to wake up in the middle of the night, especially since his jam-packed first semester at Morristown when he learned to wring every second of sleep he could out of a day. Something wakes him tonight, though, pulls him right out of a heavy slumber. He would have rolled over and gone right back to sleep, but he sleepily realizes the bed next to him is cold and, for whatever reason, that startles him awake. It doesn't make any sense—he goes to sleep without Alex far more nights than he goes to sleep with him. Being alone in bed shouldn't be enough to worry him. Something about the absence gets under his skin, though, and he sits up and rubs his eyes and stretches.

Alex isn't in their bedroom, and after a moment of silent, internal battle, John slips out of bed to look for him elsewhere. There's always a chance he's gone for a walk or up to the roof; sometimes when he's blocked on an article, a change of scene clears his head. Alex hasn't left, though—he's sitting crosslegged on the couch with the afghan from the foot of their bed wrapped around his shoulders. He's not reading or writing or looking at his computer or tablet. He's not doing anything, really, except staring into space and weaving his fingers in and out of the holes in the crochet pattern of the blanket. He doesn't stop, even when John sits down at the other end of the couch.

"Hey," John says.

"Hi," Alex says. His gaze shifts slowly until he's looking at John. The bags under his eyes are even larger than usual.

"Is something wrong?" John asks. "Did you have a nightmare?" Alex's occasional nightmares have a routine, now, one that usually involves John reading to him or talking to him or, when he's particularly jittery, driving him around the neighborhood in the middle of the night. Alex rarely tries to deal with them on his own any longer, and John's a little hurt that he's reverted back to that now.

But, no. Alex shakes his head and pulls the blanket more tightly around his shoulders. "Didn't sleep long enough for nightmares," he says. "At least, not the dream kind."

John pinches the bridge of his nose. "Babe, it's three in the morning. Please spare me the brain cells and just say what you mean? You're usually so good at that."

"You're reckless," is what Alex says.

John blinks at him. "Yyyyyes?" He waits for further elaboration. He's well aware that _reckless_ is probably in the top five mostly frequently used words to describe him.

"I just—I guess I've never thought about it before? Not really. I mean, of course I've thought about it—I'm fucking terrified of losing you, so I've thought about it, but seeing it tonight. It was different."

John blinks again. "Alex—"

"You," Alex explains before John can continue. "You just...leapt out of the salt circle. We were in a twelve by twelve room, there was nowhere to go and two entities in our space and one of them had already been violent and you just—leapt out. To save fucking _equipment_."

"We were borrowing it from the lab," John says automatically. "Damage comes out of our pay. Plus, three days of—"

"—data, I know," Alex says. He waves his hand dismissively at John. "I don't care. I don't care about data, I don't care about equipment. I care about watching you fucking _jump into danger_ , watching two spirits converge on you, watching you drop to your goddamn knees in the middle of a exorcism like something was sucking the life out of you—"

John replays the scene in his head again and again and then says, "No, I was kneeling to fix the circle, they hadn't—"

"I know that _now_ ," Alex says. It's more like a hiss, something soft and sharp and ripped out of him. "Standing in that goddamn room and watching you drop from sight—I had no fucking idea what had happened but it felt like my fucking heart had been ripped out of my chest. I couldn't _breathe_."

John remembers the look on Alex's face in the aftermath, the way he had gone grey and shocked, the way he _stared_.

"I...." John struggles for a response. What can he possibly say to that? He shifts on the couch and pulls his knees up to his chest. "I'm sorry?"

"It's not—" Alex sighs sharply and covers his face with his hands. "I know that about you, right? I love that about you. That you're just—that you just throw yourself into things. And...I don't know, there's a line, I guess. A line between doing things that are gutsy and doing things that are going to get you killed."

John doesn't know how to tell him that line is invisible if you don't care whether you live or die.

"I don't...think about things like that in the moment," he says, which isn't a lie. "I just...I react."

"I know," Alex says. He runs his hands through his hair. "It's just...it's like you're missing the part of you that knows the meaning of the word 'caution.'" He laughs a little. "God, I'm a fucking hypocrite."

John wants to tell Alex that he's not a hypocrite—that his recklessness and Alex's are two different animals. He wants to tell him that there _is_ something wrong with him, that these dangerous things happen and a part of him lights up like a beacon, like a shooting star. Something in him is activated by that danger, something that knows because he doesn't care what happens to him, it's his duty to do the things that no one else will.

But, god, that's a conversation he doesn't know that he can have. He can't handle the inevitable look on Alex's face while he tries to describe the difference between wanting to die and not caring enough to keep living. He definitely can't handle it at three in the morning.

"I'm sorry," he says again instead. "And I get it. Because this is a really fucking dangerous field we're in and I feel the same way every time you do something stupid. But I can't promise it won't happen again anymore than I could ask you to promise me the same thing."

"I know," Alex says. "I just—I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes."

They sit in silence for a moment. John finally gives in and crawls across the couch until he's close enough to touch Alex. He holds back until he sees Alex's shoulders droop and takes that as the invitation to touch, to wrap his arms around Alex's shoulders and pull him against his chest.

"I'm here," John says, because the only other option is to say _I'm sorry_ for a third time.

"Yeah," Alex says, tucking his face into the curve of John's neck.

"And," he adds after a moment, "not for nothing, but it's your project about time-disturbance correlation that we were collecting data for, so I basically saved your ass from Adams."

Alex's body shakes with something between a groan and a laugh.

"You're a fucking asshole."

"Yeah," John says.

"Next time I'm gonna let a ghost suck the life out of you."

"No you're not," John says, biting back a grin.

"No, I'm not," Alex agrees.

And they really should go back to bed, but if they're already up, there's no harm staying here for a few more minutes, sitting close and quiet in the peace of the early morning.


	13. when you make impossible demands i wish i didn't understand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John thinks, _That seems like a lot of work_ and _At least it'll kill some time_ when Alex leans in to kiss him and he can't really hide from the truth any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone requested a timestamp for John's thoughts at the beginning of [but i won't go far away](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8339470), so...there they are!

John spends three days pretending he's just tired before he gives in and admits to himself that it goes beyond that. It's a Wednesday, he's too jittery to sleep and pacing around the kitchen, where Alex corners him and offers to help him burn off some of that excess energy.

John thinks, _That seems like a lot of work_ and _At least it'll kill some time_ when Alex leans in to kiss him and he can't really hide from the truth any longer.

Alex is gorgeous and sweet and John _loves_ him, so for the first time he actually feels bad in addition to feeling guilty. He _wants_ to have long, drawn-out sex with Alex, wants to keep him in bed and make him happy and just be close to him in that way. They mess around a lot when they have sex, rib each other and joke and call each other names and provide colorful commentary, but you can't be that close to someone you love and not feel it reverberating down in the heart of you and all the way deep in your bones. 

On Thursday morning, Alex joins him in the shower and it's not difficult to let him put his hands all over John's body and whisper filthy things into his ear until he manages an orgasm, but by evening he just doesn't have the energy and he thinks that even Alexander's dirtiest promises and most dexterous tricks won't be able to get him interested.

He should talk to Alex. He knows he should talk to Alex. He knows, objectively, that Alex isn't going to dump him just because he doesn't really feel like having sex right now. John's never eager to talk about his feelings, though, and these feelings are so embarrassing and it's just—

They end up busy for the next few days, out late on cases and running weird errands for Washington and stuck finishing up experiments in the lab far too late into the night. It makes it easier to avoid the issue altogether. Of course he's tired when they get home, of course they don't have time, of course he has other things on his mind. 

And then, suddenly, they're not busy and John's excuses start getting weaker. By the next Thursday night, he's resorted to playing really obviously dumb, willfully misinterpreting Alex's innuendo and thinking, as he sips a hot toddy alone in the kitchen, that things can't keep going on like this. He needs to talk to Alex, he _knows_ it. God, why does this _happen to him_ , why can't he just be a normal twenty-three year old guy who can pop a boner whenever his boyfriend wants one?

Friday evening, Alex has some blog work to do and John finds himself alone in their bedroom with hours to fill on his own. Hours where he can no longer run from his own thoughts. Well, he could, actually—he could change into his running clothes and go outside and loop a few miles around the neighborhood. John hates running—it's _the worst_ —and all he can think about when he _is_ running is how garbage it is. It's convenient when he doesn't want to think, but the time for not thinking is probably over. The time for coming up with a plan is probably overdue.

He lies flat on his back in the middle of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. He closes his eyes and thinks back to past sexual encounters, tries to put himself in the moment, tries to cling to the memory of that _wanting_ , that physical rush, that spread of heat throughout his body. There's a flicker of interest—god, that time he went down on Alex in the back stairwell at the university was _hot_ —but nothing that lasts more than a few seconds.

He covers his eyes with his hands. "Your boyfriend is so hot!" he snaps at his dick. "Could you get with the fucking program?"

So he needs a plan. He needs to have a conversation with Alex. He needs to explain this. He needs to come clean that it's John's problem, that it's nothing Alex did. He needs to admit that he doesn't know when it will stop.

Alex won't break up with him. Sure, dudes have kicked him out in the past when he couldn't get it up for a few days in a row, but never anyone who mattered, and Alex matters more than everyone who came before him combined. But Alex's sex drive is sky high, sometimes, and thinking about being unable to provide for days, maybe _weeks_ makes John distinctly nervous and guilty. It's not that he thinks Alex would cheat on him—hell, he wouldn't even care is Alex went out and hooked up with someone else for mutual orgasms, that's not the point. He just doesn't want Alex to resent him.

His mind slowly loops back around to the middle of that thought. Because. That's an option.

He's never really thought about it before—he's known people in open relationships and he knew guys in college who _wanted_ open relationships, by which they meant they wanted to be able to fuck whomever they wanted in addition to their girlfriends. But a real open relationship—it makes John feel weird, for a second, but it's only a second. Because, well, he's not saying Alex should go out and woo some stranger, it would just be sex. That could be a thing, right?

He strains to reach the nightstand and grab his phone, then thumbs it open and goes right to google. He stares at the search bar for a second and then shrugs and types _how do you have an open relationship._

There are many, many more relevant looking results than he expected.

John gives up, pushing himself up and getting off of the bed to grab his bag. He settles back down with his back against the wall and starts to scroll through the first suggestion, poised to start taking notes. This might not end up being a viable solution, but at least now he feels like he's _doing_ something. Maybe tonight, he can sleep without feeling guilty every time Alex touches him.


	14. Interdepartmental Cooperation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Molly is excited to study the internet famous haunted chair that Laurens brought back to the lab, but equally excited to work with Laurens and Ham on a real investigation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for a timestamp meme. Someone requested Molly's PoV regarding [this ficlet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8306917) about John finding a haunted chair.
> 
> (Some of this has been altered slightly from both when it was first posted and from the events of the first story because I wrote that before many of the other fics in this series and Molly has taken on a much larger and friendlier role than I initially thought she would.)

Molly has to use two different EMF detectors before she believes the numbers she's getting off of the chair.

"Holy shit," she mutters, flipping one off and on again just for the tiny thrill of seeing it go from dead quiet to flashing off the charts. "I have never seen a single object haunted like this before in my fricking life."

"I know!" Hamilton sounds almost giddy as he hooks up an audio recorder in preparation for more tests. "So much energy compressed into such a small space—I've read about stuff like this but I've never seen it in person before."

"Don't thank me all at once," Laurens says, and Ham practically has hearts for eyes. He puts down his recorder and throws his arms around Laurens, nearly hanging off of him as he beams. Laurens beams back through his bravado. Molly is torn between puking and cooing.

"I'm not going to kiss you," Molly tells him, eyebrows raised, and Laurens rolls his eyes.

"I'm devastated."

"Stop trying to out gay each other," Ham says. He unlatches himself from Laurens and picks up his audio recorder again. "Let's start figuring this thing out."

Molly does most of her work with von Steuben and a portion with Abby Adams, so it's strange working in Washington's lab. It's strange for many reasons actually—for one, it's like a mirror image of von Steuben's lab space, with everything backwards and just off enough that it feels almost surreal. For another, Washington's lab is such a sausage fest, a fact which she doesn't shy away from sharing with Hamilton and Laurens and Burr, who's sulking in the corner for some reason beyond her comprehension.

"On one hand, the part of me that supports equality and inclusion notices that pretty often," Laurens admits. "On the other hand, the part of me that's a big proponent of sausage is not disappointed." He waggles his eyebrows. "And, fuck, this is a very attractive platter."

"Jesus fuck, kill that metaphor with fire already," Ham says, shoving Laurens absently as he leans over a tablet to review some readings. "Also, have I mentioned lately that your lines are terrible?"

"Every day," Laurens says, leaning over Hamilton's shoulder to look at his tablet. "Go back to that other reading, will you?"

"I'm just saying, compared to Abby, or even Steubs, there are a lot of dicks in this room," Molly says. She climbs up onto the table to get a better look at the chair from above. She doesn't miss the way Laurens' hand soccer-moms out to make sure she doesn't fall. Laurens is a good egg.

"There are no white people in our lab," Hamilton says absently. "So, you know, it almost shakes out."

"Almost," Molly says.

Sausage fest aside, it's actually pretty cool to work with Laurens and Ham. She's worked with Laurens in the classroom regularly since last semester—once Steubs saw how well they tag-teamed classroom management, he was sure to assign them a shared TA class in the spring as well. She likes Laurens; between working together and Steubs' parties, they're definitely friends at this point. Ham, however, she only knows from being the loud know-it-all in class, loudly arguing with people at Steubs' parties, and never being more than five feet away from Laurens if he can help it. They're cute, she'll give them that, and they seem crazy about each other, but watching them work together is something else. She knows Laurens is smart as hell and she knew, academically, that Hamilton was kind of a genius, but...wow. The guy's got a recall to rival her own and knows the weirdest minutiae. It's almost creepy how quickly he can answer questions and solve problems. It's definitely creepy how he and Laurens can communicate without talking.

Still—it's cool.

Molly tells people she chose MUNJ over MIT after seeing what people in Cambridge called a bagel, but the truth is, even particle physics can't hold a candle to the thrill of studying the paranormal. She loves it. But there aren't a ton of people who love it the same way she does, even here at Morristown. A disproportionate number of her fellow doctoral candidates are hyper-focused on field work or on some very narrow, practical field of study. Cameras, audio, chemistry—she sees the appeal in that, she does, but she didn't get into parapsych to chase ghosts. No, Molly wants to know every single thing about them. She wants to know where ghosts come from and why, she wants to know why paranormal encounters seems to be on a very slow but steady up-tick over the past ten or so years. She wants to know where they go when they can't be seen. She wants to know how they manage to do the things they do. How are they sentient? How do they interact with the living world?

They're hard questions and she doesn't fool herself into thinking all of them will be answered in her lifetime. She's going to do her damnedest to try, however, and it's such a relief to be around other people who have the same goal. Sure, Ham and Laurens do freelance IP work and seem to get a thrill from hunting spirits all around northern New Jersey, but they're also just as fascinated by theory as she is. They get just as nerdily excited over weird shit as she does.

Working with them is definitely cool.

Washington stops by as lunch drifts into dinner and Molly starts to think about eating something other than pudding cups. He seems surprised to see her, but ultimately pleased. Laurens and Hamilton rarely seem to go anywhere without one another and if they're not alone, they're usual with Lafayette. She figures he's just happy to see that they have other friends. He's kind of like a dad, sometimes.

"Ms. Ludwig, it's a pleasure," he says. "I trust the boys haven't gotten you into trouble?"

Molly can't stop the laugh that slips out of her at that, which is awful, because now she has to explain her dumb joke.

"It's funny because that's what they used to say about girls who got pregnant out of wedlock," she says, tugging on a strand of hair. "That a boy got them 'in trouble.' And it's funny because I'm a lesbian. And these two are dating each other. So. No trouble. Of that kind."

Laurens laughs. Washington looks vaguely amused. Ham rolls his eyes.

"No wonder you get along with John, your jokes are just as bad," he says.

"My jokes are amazing and so are Molly's," Laurens says, tipping his chin up haughtily.

"I can't believe I let you touch my dick, sometimes," Ham says. Laurens cackles and Molly rolls her eyes and Washington pinches the bridge of his nose.

"I'm going to order some pizzas," he says, heading towards his office and waving dismissively at them as he goes.

Haunted chair, other science nerds, and free pizza. Molly definitely needs to swing by Washington's lab more often.


	15. i have never loved anyone like i loved you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex has no trouble finding whole worlds to explore within John. He sketches some of those worlds on his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a timestamp request for Alex's PoV either before John wakes up or when Alex first discovers his new tattoo in [the constellations aligned](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8370454).

When Alex is high, he sleeps like a dead thing. When's he's drunk-drunk, he wakes up every hour or so and then immediately falls back to sleep. When he's tipsy, he drifts in and out of sleep, never going all the way under until he's sobered up. When he's in an unfamiliar bed, he can never quite allow himself to give entirely into sleep.

Tipsy and high, post-orgasm, in von Steuben's library, he seems to be falling somewhere in the middle. He drifts for a while and then sits up straight, wide awake, and then falls back into his half-sleep when he decides not to get out of bed. It's a few hours into the night when he gives up and props himself up in the bed, hoping maybe he can sober up entirely and then at least nap until it's time to go home.

Next to him, John sleeps on, undisturbed. He's on his stomach, his hair a riotous mess of tangled curls that's mostly up off of his neck and back, bare in the cool air of the room. Alex shivers—John is _beautiful_ , this ethereal being that he's somehow allowed to touch, something otherworldly and precious.

He would blame the affection on the lingering alcohol and marijuana sluggishly crawling through his system, but he tries not to lie to himself—this is how he always feels about John, deep down inside.

There's a single curl hanging down at the nape of John's neck, and Alex pushes it away with soft, delicate movements. His fingers glide away, still hovering over John's back, just above the heat of his skin. There are freckles scattered across his back. There are freckles scattered all over him, really, but spread across this smooth, unblemished expanse of skin, they're particularly striking.

 _I'm going to kiss each one,_ Alex told John once, on an unseasonably warm evening in early-September that found them lounging shirtless on the roof of their apartment building.

 _Freckles are triggered by sunlight, so they come and go depending on what parts of my body are exposed to how much UVB radiation,_ John told him. _Thus, it's impossible to keep track of how many there are, let alone where they are and if you've kissed them or not._

 _I'm trying to be romantic, you dick,_ Alex whined.

_Well, next time have better science on your side._

It led to a kick fight and then an impromptu wrestling match and then the two of them hidden between the side of the storage shed and the wall, just out of sight, pressed together and panting with their hands on each other's dicks.

It was a nice night.

But, John's pedantry aside, Alex really does love his freckles. Sometimes it borders on a fetish, although he's not sure if he can call it a fetish if it's limited to one single person. He thinks that if John had an excess of chest hair or scars, he might find himself obsessed with chest hair or scars. As it stands, he traces between John's freckles in the low light of the library, mapping out his back, his fingers still hovering just above John's skin. It's like a road map to John's body, or maybe a star map. That seems to make more sense, somehow—constellations spread across John's skin, countless stories to tell and worlds to explore. That's his John—beautiful and frightening both, unknowable and ever-changing and full of so many stories that Alex will never be able to learn them all, though he's going to spend the rest of his life trying.

It's possible he's still a little high.

He leans over to ghost a kiss against the nape of John's neck and then, finally, lowers his fingers to brush John's back. John makes a quiet, sleepy noise, but doesn't otherwise stir, even once Alex's fingers are tracking paths back and forth against his skin.

If he's going to be doing this for a while—and he can't sleep and his brain is too sluggish to read, so he probably will be—he needs to get comfortable. He shifts carefully, so as not to disturb John further, and sits for a moment to stretch. He reaches over to the desk near the bed to check the time on his phone. When he puts it down again, the illuminated screen shines on a felt tipped pen sitting near the edge of the desk. Alex stares at it for a moment before swiping it and then settling back into the bed, his body curled around John's. He takes the cap off and the tip hovers over John's back for a moment.

It's stupid. Silly. But god, something in him wants to mark John. Not to claim him, no, but rather to bring these stories out of him, trace them across his skin, the history of John Laurens.

Sentimental. Maudlin. But Alex doesn't shy away from being sentimental, not about John. Plus, it's not like they're going to be permanent. One shower and they'll wash away down the drain, a secret between the two of them disappearing before anyone else can question it.

He sets the tip of the pen near a freckle on John's shoulder and slowly, steadily, begins to trace constellations across his back.

*

John got a tattoo. John got a _tattoo._

The words keep whirling around Alex's mind as he tries to make sense of them. John—his John—went out and got a tattoo. This afternoon! Just, randomly! With no forethought!

And, okay, the "no forethought" part isn't a surprise, John isn't exactly known for his patience and good sense, but still! He didn't even call Alex or tell him or...anything. Alex isn't sure whether to be offended by that. He's not sure of very much at all right now.

A million possibilities are whirling through his mind. John's an artist, maybe some art or something? And he sort of implied it has something to do with Alex, so maybe Alex's name? Maybe something parapsych related or a famous quote? It's not all that big, judging by the gauze currently taped to John's shoulder, but there are still a million possibilities, more than he can reasonably imagine in the few moments he has before the gauze is peeled away.

In the bathroom, John leans over a crumpled piece of paper with aftercare instructions printed on it. Alex watches him carefully in the mirror.

"Okay," John says, "I'm supposed to take off the bandage, then carefully wash away the gross shit that's left on it with warm water and mild antibacterial soap. After that, I'm supposed to put this goop on it."

"I can do that," Alex says. He wants to rip off the bandage already—he's so _curious_ he has to _know_. But it's John's secret, John's body, and Alex is going to follow his lead, even as his palms itch to pry away the medical tape. John runs the tap, waving his fingers beneath it to test its temperature. Alex taps his fingers against his thighs impatiently and wonders what's waiting under that tape and wonders _why_ John put it there to begin with. He bites his lip, just as John turns around.

"What?" John asks.

"Just...you know I was joking last night, right?" Alex says, and John freezes. For a horrible moment, before he places the panicked expression, Alex is afraid that this _is_ about what Alex said last night when he was teasing him about Ben Walker's new tattoo. "When I was ragging you about not having a tattoo even though we've been together longer than Ben's been fucking Steubs." John relaxes after that, and Alex releases a matching breath of relief.

"I know," John says. "This isn't about that. I mean, I guess it is, since that's why it was on my mind, but it's not even about you, really. Except, I guess it's about you too, but it's mostly about—fucking, just take the bandage off, okay? Jesus."

Alex laughs, feeling more centered and less guilty. He turns John around again so he's facing the mirror and hesitates for only a moment longer. Then he's pulling the tape up gently and peeling away the bandage and then....

Then.

Wow.

He goes still for a moment, just staring at the stark, swollen black ink. It's Alex's stupid drawing, Alex's dumb, sentimental constellations from last night. Alex scribbled a romantic notion all over John's back and John turned around and put it there permanently.

Just. Wow.

He swallows and gently nudges John over until his shoulder is near the running water. Alex splashes the new tattoo with wet, soapy fingers, washing away the ink smudges and droplets of blood. He cups some more water in his hands and then pours it over John's shoulder once, twice, and then again. John stands up and Alex grabs a handful of tissues and pats the constellations dry, then takes the tube of aftercare goop from John and tenderly massages it into the lines and dots. He can't stop staring at it, staring at his marks made permanent. His silly love letter frozen in time on John's skin.

He swallows against a lump forming in his throat.

"I don't think I've ever heard you stay this quiet while you were awake," John says. He's going for irreverent, but Alex can hear the anxiety in the words.

"I spent the last few minutes thinking about a million possibilities, but this didn't even occur to me," Alex finally says. He meets John's eyes in the mirror and has to swallow again. His stupid, beautiful John. He can't fight the smile starting to spread across his face.

John takes a deep breath and looks away, down at his hands. He says, "I was thinking about it. About you...about...about what you said about us being together just as long. Longer. And I didn't...I didn't do it because you said that. It wasn't like...a challenge or a contest. But I was thinking about how we were joking about it, about Ben and von Steuben, but I've known you just as long, and I know. I know I love you. I know—I know even if you walked out on me tomorrow, I'll never love anyone else the way I love you."

John pauses and Alex has to stop himself from wrapping his arms around John and kissing him breathless or holding on to him for the rest of their lives.

"I was thinking about that," John continues carefully. "And I was thinking about how you love these dumb things about me that I'd never think to love. How I love dumb things about you that probably aren't, you know, objectively attractive. And the drawings on my back and and how you...you, um. You love me enough to map out my body like that. To learn it and leave your mark. And I looked up and I was standing in front of a tattoo parlor and...."

Their friends make fun of them, sometimes, for being in sync. They'll have conversations in the field without uttering a full sentence between them, or pipe up to finish each other's thoughts in classes, or answer questions for each other without looking up or thinking about it. They're in tune, thinking on the same frequency, and it happens all the time, but this seems particularly stark. The things about John he doesn't love about himself, the things that drive Alex crazy because of John specifically—hadn't that been what he was thinking about last night when he first started to trace John's freckles? How he loves them because they're John's, how he'd love anything about John, how he wants to learn his body and leave his mark and hold all of that potential and mystery, all of those stories in his hands?

He struggles for words. He always struggles for words around John. John is so much more than he can ever articulate.

"John," he says softly, but that's all he can come up with. He looks down to the tattoo again, the delicate lines tracing the paths that Alex has carved out. He brushes his fingers over them, feeling the swell of them beneath his fingertips. This is the story Alex wrote across John's skin, and now it's a permanent part of him. _Fuck._

John twitches. Alex watches him flush, watches the pink heat spread from his neck down to his shoulders. "Don't get, like—"

"What," Alex says, "sentimental? You got my fucking doodles tattooed on your body, you utter sap!" He laughs then, because it's so _absurd_. John got a tattoo of Alex's absent sentimentality and now he's twitching because Alex is being to emotional? It's so _John_ that he can't stop laughing and John elbows him and he shoves John back and something eases between them. He can feel John's anxiety dissipate as they push and shove and smack and wrestle until John's weight pins Alex's back to the door, his arms around Alex's neck, their foreheads resting together as they pant and laugh and smile at each other with naked joy. 

"You like it?" John asks, almost shyly. 

"I love it," Alex says, and John relaxes all at once, sagging against him. "I love you."

"Now who's the sap?" John says, grinning.

"Uh, still the person with the tattoo, actually," Alex says, and before he can say more, John is kissing him. He presses close, presses Alex against the door, kisses him almost desperately. Alex's fingers drift up to brush the edge of the tattoo again, his heart too big for his chest. He loves John—he loves John so fucking much, he loves John more than he's ever loved anyone or anything. He'll always, _always_ love John and now he'll always be a part of John. John will carry and physical part of Alex around with him every day for the rest of his life, a manifestation of what they can do together—create new stories, entirely new _worlds._

It's a lot. But god, John is so, _so_ worth it.


	16. Friday Afternoon Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John hates running, but not as much as he hates talking about his feelings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for a prompt someone sent on tumblr: "Someone seeing John's tattoo for the first time and getting (a drunk?) Alex or John to explain its origins."

"I hate running," John groans, lifting one foot and then the other to check the laces on his sneakers.

"You run all the time," Molly says. She watching both him and Dolley get ready like they're prime time television while she eats raspberries right out of the container. John's not entirely sure why they're meeting in von Steuben's lab and not Washington's, where he works, or Adams', where Dolley works, or even the fucking locker rooms at the gym, but here they are, stretching and preparing for a few laps around the track.

"Yeah, but I hate it," he says. "I'd rather to go to the gym. Running is garbage. It's hard and gross."

"I agree with you one hundred percent," Molly says. "That's why I don't run unless something's chasing me."

"You agreed to the run, Laurens," Dolley reminds him.

"Yeah," he says, "that's because Jamika agreed to it and she's my gym buddy on Friday afternoons."

Jamika McHenry and John both have a two hour gap in their Friday schedules. At the start of the semester, they made a pact to use that time to go to the gym for an hour unless work interfered, and with the exception of breaks for sickness or paying IP jobs off campus, they've generally stuck to it. Dolley, on the other hand, usually has class Friday afternoons. On this particular Friday, with that class cancelled, she's using the time to squeeze in a mid-day run. She invited Jamika, who accepted and, faced with going to the gym alone or running with his friends, John found himself accepting as well.

He _hates_ running.

"You could use the extra hours to sleep like a normal person," Molly suggests.

"If I lose my girlish figure, Alex might throw me over for someone else," John says. "Also, running or going to the gym are like, the only times I can turn my brain off."

"I'm pretty sure you could grow an extra head or turn into a lizard person and Ham _still_ wouldn't throw you over," Molly says. "I feel you on the turning off your brain thing, though. That's why I cross stitch."

Out in the hall, John can hear Jamika whistling and a few moments later she breezes into the room, already in a sports bra, running leggings, and sneakers. "You guys ready?"

"Almost," John says.

"He's being a shit about running," Dolley says.

"He hates running," Jamika says.

John looks up solely to give both of them pointed looks and finishes with his sneakers. He stands up, sighs theatrically, and then pulls his t-shirt over his head.

"Let's get on with this torture," he says, but the words are barely out of his mouth before Molly says, "Whoa, what's that?"

John, Dolley, and Jamika all look different directions, attempting to pin down the source of Molly's confusion.

"No," she says, "I mean—" She puts her raspberries down on the desk and then gets up and crosses to where John is standing, tapping him on the back of the right shoulder. "Since when do you have a tattoo?"

"Oh." John reaches back and touches the tattoo absently. He hopes he's not flushing too obviously, but even if he isn't, he can't help his automatic smile. "Um."

"Yeah, I don't remember you having a tattoo before," Jamika says. "Is that new? It's cute."

"Ah—"

"And we were literally just talking about tattoos like, two weeks ago," Molly continues, inspecting it more closely.

"That's nice," Dolley says, "but if we're gonna finish this run this century...."

"Yeah," John says, because the alternative is explaining this to everyone. "We should definitely get moving."

Jamika steps back and frowns at him. "Okay, now I know something's up if you're trying to talk us into running with enthusiasm. What the fuck is up, Laurens?"

"Um." John looks back and forth between them, but before he can come up with an excuse, Molly puts at least some of the pieces together. Understanding dawns on her face and she slowly starts to smirk.

"Oh my god," she says.

"Let's just—"

"I'm not sure _how_ he fits in, but this is _clearly_ something to do with Ham."

Busted.

All three of the girls are staring at him now. John touches his tattoo again unconsciously and fights back the urge to hide his face.

"He drew it," John admits.

"Alex Hamilton _tattooed you_?" Jamika says, a skeptical furrow in her brow.

"No, no, jesus christ, I'd never trust him with a tattoo gun," John says. "That night at Steubs'—the speakeasy? When we were all shitting on Ben?"

"And your takeaway from that mockery was, 'I should go do the same thing?'" Molly asks.

"No," John says. "Not...initially."

Jamika walks around his back to inspect the tattoo again and Dolley finally gives in and follows. John tries not to twitch under their attention.

"That night," he continues, mostly for Molly's sake, "I woke up in the middle of the night and he was tracing constellations on my back in a marker that he didn't realize at the time was permanent—Alex, I mean, obviously, not Ben. So the next day, I'm walking around with these designs he drew all over me, killing time while my car is in the shop, and I ended up at a tattoo parlor by chance and...I don't know."

He wants to tell her, _And we gave Ben a lot of shit, but I understand why he did it._ He wants to tell her about how he carries this piece of Alex with him all the time now. He wants to tell her that it's not even really about Alex—it's about him and the life that he chose and the person he was afraid to be and how Alex has proven that person is lovable, that person is worth fighting for. He wants to tell her that he never thought he would meet anyone so eager to map him out and learn him.

He won't tell her any of those things. He likes Molly a lot, but half that shit he can barely say to Alex on a good day.

"It means a lot of things," he settles for saying. "It means...more than just what it looks like, I guess."

"I can't decide if it's cute or just over the top," Molly muses. "Can it be both?"

"I still think it's cute," Jamika says.

"As much as I hate to admit it, I think it's cute too," Dolley says.

John ducks his head and grins, reaching up one more time to touch it. Molly gives him a good natured shove and then goes back to her desk and Jamika and Dolley back off, no longer crowded at his back.

"If we're all done fawning over Laurens' tattoo, maybe we could actually start running?" Dolley says, glancing at the clock.

"Do we have to?" John asks.

"Yes," Jamika and Dolley say in unison. "Just let me get a hairtie," Jamika adds.

As she goes through her bag to find one, John pulls out his phone.

_going on a run with jamika and dolley,_ he sends to Alex. Then, _don't go to your next class without seeing me okay?_

_Sure thing_ , Alex sends back immediately, which is a clear indication that his current class is boring the fuck out of him. _I'll probably be in the office._ There's a pause, then he adds, _Is everything okay?_

_everything's fine,_ John assures him. _just i love you and i want to see you okay?_

_Always okay. I love you too, babe. I'll see you later ❤️_

"Laurens!" Dolley calls from the door. She and Jamika are already in the hall. "We don't have all day!"

"Coming, coming," John grumbles, but even with the prospect of a five mile run in his future, he can't get the smile off of his face.


	17. lie in bed all day and eat pop-tarts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's after one and John still hasn't gotten out of bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was from two requests on tumblr for further exploration of John's depression and a day where, as Alex suggests in _i saw the whole story unwind_ , Alex offers to lay in bed with him and eat pop-tarts when the world is too much.

Sunday is always the slowest day of the week for Alexander. Monday through Friday are filled with classes and teaching and grading and working. Saturday usually means a case or going out or blog work—there's always something happening to fill the hours. But Sundays—Sundays are different. Sometimes they'll have a case or an invitation to get brunch with friends or a lecture in the city, but more often than not, it's a quiet day, a day Alex can spend catching up on reading and writing and grading and work.

It's for those reasons that he doesn't blink when John is still asleep when Alex gets out of bed. It's nearly time for finals and John's been hosting tutoring sessions for his students three times a week—he deserves to sleep. He's still sleeping at noon, which isn't totally out of character, but when one o'clock rolls around and he still hasn't appeared, Alex gives in and slips quietly into their bedroom.

John is still in bed and he opens his eyes when Alex opens the door. His expression is flat and unreadable, which in and of itself says quite a bit—usually, John can muster a smile for Alex no matter how tired he is. This morning, he says nothing, just watches as Alex crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.

"You feeling okay?" Alex says quietly. There's no reason to pitch his voice so low—Lafayette has long since gotten up and left to go see the Washingtons and John is clearly awake.

John shrugs, but doesn't say anything. Alex pets his hair and he closes his eyes again, sighing softly. Alex is at a loss—John has been doing well lately, as far as he can tell. He's had periods of depression in the past and dark days, but usually there's a lead-up. Yesterday had been fine—they laughed through a lunch with Herc and Lafayette, they went to a lecture at the county library, they did some work on Alex's blog...it was a normal day. Certainly nothing that can explain this crash.

"Do you need anything?" he asks. He doesn't know what else to do.

"No," John says quietly. "I'm just tired."

"Okay," Alex says, but he doesn't move. They sit there for another moment in silence before Alex asks, "Do you want company?"

John is quiet, eyes still closed, breathing still even. Just as Alex is about to give in and return to his laptop in the living room, John opens his eyes again.

"Yes," he whispers so softly that Alex almost doesn't hear it. It surprises him—he's frozen for a second as his brain catches up to his ears. He hopes this means John's getting better at asking for help and not that he's doing so badly today that he's absolutely desperate.

Alex pulls his belt out and drops it on the floor, them shimmies out of his jeans. He goes around to his side of the bed and slips under the blankets, sliding across the mattress until he can wrap his arms around John, who's stiff and unmoving for several long breaths, finally relaxing on a sigh and melting back against Alex. He turns in Alex's embrace, rolls over so he can wrap his arms around Alex's chest. His eyes are squeezed shut and his breath is warm where is blows softly past Alex's throat.

"I just can't do it today," John says eventually, after staring into space for an indeterminable amount of time.

Alex isn't sure if he wants a reply or if he's just saying it to say it. He takes a shot in the dark and asks, "Do what?"

"Be a person," John says after another stretch of quiet.

Alex has no idea what that means, how to interpret it, what he's supposed to do. He wants to tell John that he's smart and beautiful and perfect and so, so loved, but the solemn atmosphere of the room keeps him, for once in his life, from speaking. The thought of breaking this fragile silence makes him wince like someone's hit the wrong note in the middle of a well-known song. It wouldn't be right. But the silence doesn't feel right, either—none of this feels right. Everything about it is foreign to him; he doesn't know what to do with drawn out quiet, with inaction, with lethargy.

But this isn't about him. It's not about what he needs.

Minutes pass, hours pass, maybe. Alex starts to hum a song stuck in his head, something soft and gentle, a compromise between chattering away in his uncertainty and keeping the room under the weight of the crypt-like stillness. John doesn't respond to the humming—he doesn't respond to much at all. Alex doesn't think he's asleep, but he doesn't move or speak or even sigh. He just lays on Alex's chest, a warm, heavy weight that rises and falls with every breath. Alex does his best to stroke through the tangles of John's hair and rubs his hand up and down his back and shoulders in long, measured strokes. His brain is itching to do a dozen other things, but he ignores that urge and focuses instead on counting John's breaths and memorizing the ceiling.

"I'm sorry."

Alex isn't sure how long it's been. He knows how long it feels like it's been. He blinks down at John, who finally shifts enough to look up. Alex's chest is immediately chilled as the air of the room hits the spots that have been long-warmed by the press of John's skin.

"You don't have to be sorry," Alex says. 

"I wasted your day."

"How do you feel?" Alex asks, because he can't offer an automatic denial without being dishonest—there were things he was going to do today that aren't going to get done. He doesn't regret foregoing that work to be with John when he needed him, but the point still stands.

"Like shit," John says. "I should know better than to give into this—I always feel like shit afterwards, I never feel better." He rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. "You didn't have to stay."

"That doesn't matter," Alex says. This one is easier to answer. "I'd rather be here than anywhere else. Always."

John looks away. He moves, too—up and over just enough that he's sharing Alex's pillow instead of lying across his chest. Alex moves as well, rolls onto his side so that they're facing each other, close enough that it's hard to look at John without crossing his eyes.

"Do you need anything?" Alex asks. "Are you hungry?"

"No," John says. "But I should eat, I guess. And bathe and...fuck, I don't know. Stop being a mess."

"You're not a mess," Alex says. He traces the arch of John's cheekbone and John shudders and closes his eyes. "You're just...having a bad day." He knows he should stop there, but the next question forces its way out before he can close his mouth: "What happened? Did—did something happen? Is something wrong?"

"No," John says. "Yes. I don't know. I just woke up and...it seemed like too much." Something in his expression is begging Alex to understand and he doesn't, not at all, but he knows better than to say that. John may refuse to say the word, but Alex recognizes it for what it is and he's read the wikipedia page and Mayo Clinic entry on depression half a dozen times since the fall—most of it is completely outside his own experience, but that doesn't make it any less real. 

"Okay," Alex says. "Do you want...do you want to stay here? Or get up? Or—" He tries to reign himself in. The last thing John needs is to deal with Alex's vague panic of uselessness. 

"You can go," John says.

"No, no!" Alex's hand shoots out to grab John's so fast it startles both of them. "That's not what I meant. I just mean...I want to help."

"Oh," John says. He looks down at their hands, silent, and curses himself for going about this all wrong. He had a plan—last fall he sat down and he made a plan, he made a list of things he could do to help John when he gets like this, he made himself a whole little resource guide, and instead of taking any of those steps, he's been floundering all morning, frozen in the face of the reality of the situation.

Still, he can maybe salvage some of it now. He hasn't made any grevious mis-steps so far. John is still sitting here with him—he still wants Alex nearby, Alex still offers some sort of comfort.

"I'm going to get us something to eat and come right back," he tells John, squeezing his hands. "We don't have a ton—I think those muffins Laf likes? And some bananas and pop-tarts."

John cracks a smile. It's just a small one and almost reflexive—John barely seems to notice he's doing it. It's the first real smile Alex has seen all day.

"What?" he asks.

"Nothing," John says. "I just...it's not important. I was remembering a thing."

"What?" Alex repeats.

"Nothing, it's stupid," John insists. "It's one of those things that feels significant to you even though it's not like...noteworthy to the other person."

Alex wracks his brain—it's desperately important to him that he remember this, that he do this one small thing for John. It's not as hard, thinking as he is of that first long talk with John about his depression, as he thought it would be.

"That night at the sushi restaurant?" Alex asks. "When I told you I'd stay in bed with you all day and eat pop-tarts if that's what you wanted?" John is surprised, he can tell. His eyes are wide and his cheeks start to flush beneath his freckles. Alex is glad to see it—John's complexion has been so pale and ashy this morning that Alex is happy to see any color at all back in his cheeks.

"Yeah," he says softly. "I know it's just a thing you said but...I don't know, I think about it sometimes, still."

"I meant it," Alex swears. "You're important to me. You know that, right? Your...your happiness is important to me. Your pain means something to me. So yeah, I'm going to do what I can to try and help you feel better. I know that doesn't like...fix it. But." He shrugs. "I have to try."

John averts his gaze again, looks back down to their clasped hands. "It doesn't fix it," he agrees. "But it...helps. You help." He looks like he wants to add something else, but he closes his mouth before he can speak any further. Alex waits, just to be sure he's not going to add anything more, and when he's relatively sure John's finished, he squeezes his hands.

"I'm going to go get some pop-tarts," he says. "I'll be right back." He kisses John's forehead and slowly, reluctantly, disentangles himself from John's embrace and leaves the warmth of the bed. His muscles groan in protest after so long in the same position and his skin breaks out in goosebumps after being wrapped up in blankets and body heat, but he ignores them and allows himself the smallest of smiles.

He can't fix this, but he can bring John pop-tarts and hold onto him and remind him that he's worth so much more than he thinks. That's not nothing. He can't fix it, but John knows he's here and he cares and, for the moment, that's enough.


	18. Three-sentence ficlets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of three-sentence ficlets, from a meme on tumblr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of these are ghosthunters except for the very last one, which is canon.

John + first kiss with a boy

*

"Lots of guys do it," says AJ Aquino—by far the hottest guy on John's baseball team, or at least the one that John thinks about the most when he falls into absent daydreams about all the _stuff_ you do with guys—or, rather, _people_ —you like. "It doesn't mean anything, it's just like, practice for when you get with a girl, you feel me?"

John summons his best naive and innocent expression as he nods and pretends, yes, absolutely, this is a thing he wants to do with girls and he totally isn't going to enjoy it and he totally believes that AJ wants to do it with girls too, because he has a feeling that's how AJ wants him to react. He manages to hold onto the expression until AJ has leaned in and pressed their lips together, at which point John's mouth curls into a small, giddy smile, his stomach churning with excited nerves and ebullient joy that he's finally, _finally_ getting his first kiss.

* * *

John and Francis, after getting together for the first time

*

When John was dating Angus, everyone knew it; they may not have engaged in sloppy make-outs in the hallways and called each other petnames and held hands all over campus, but they were always together, always smiling, always ribbing each other in public and laughing together and standing comfortably close. Everyone knew and no one cared and John didn't even really stop to think about it.

John doesn't miss Angus, not when he gets the joy of kissing and touching and holding his best friend the way he's secretly wanted to for years, even if it's just in the privacy of their room. But sometimes, when he and Francis are keeping a careful six inches of space between them in the dining hall and being sure not to touch too long or look too hard, he thinks of Angus, of the easy way they were together, and feels something fluttering in the back of his chest, soft and quiet and a little bit sad.

* * *

Lafayette meeting George and Martha for the first time

*

He has one picture that he keeps looking at, bringing it up on his phone and squinting at the faces, praying that he'll recognize these strangers when he sees them, praying that they'll recognize him and greet him with a smile, even if it's just a smile of polite obligation. They've spoken once on the phone, Gilbert nervous about his English for the first time in years, listening quietly as they told him they were excited to meet him and happy to pick him up and shuttled him to where he needs to be, but it's so easy to lie when you can't look someone in the face and Gilbert has years of experience being someone's reluctant responsibility.

When he steps out from beyond security, though, all of those thoughts slip out of his mind in surprise; George and Martha are waiting for him with a sign and a smile and a balloon, Martha murmuring, "I hope you like hugs, dear," before enveloping him in her arms, and maybe this won't be nearly as bad as he feared, after all.

* * *

Eliza, first day of summer

*

The day after high school graduation isn't technically the first day of summer, but it certainly feels like it. Summer has always meant freedom, and what is the end of high school and looming college orientation if not the ultimate freedom—freedom from childhood, from the weight of the Schuyler name, from the people who have known her for her entire life, from the whispers that still sometimes follow her around. It's the first day of summer and the first day of Eliza—not Angelica's sister, not Philip and Catherine's daughter, not the weird girl who talks to ghosts, just Eliza, all on her own and ready to break free and write her own story.

* * *

Alex and co, emergency doctor's appointment for a tetanus shot

*

Alex hates hospitals, which, yes, is terribly cliched, but he thinks he has a pretty good excuse—all three times he's visited a hospital in his life ended in the death of a relative. So he was fidgety, of course, in the aftermath of his fall, insisting until he was blue in the face that the bleeding wasn't _that_ bad and he _probably_ had a tetanus booster semi-recently and the ED bill was going to be _astronomical_ and this was probably the sort of thing they could do in health services on Monday so the whole thing was moot.

But he's here now, and while he won't say that he's _calm_ , he's far better off than he's ever been before, and the reason for that is sitting beside him, combing fingers through his hair, humming absently under his breath, and anchoring Alex firmly to the present as the anxiety of the past fades to a dull roar in the back of his mind.

* * *

Alex, art

*

Alex doesn't know anything about art; it wasn't exactly part of the curriculum at his various schools on the island and once he got to Columbia, there were more important ways to spend his academic credits and his free time. But here he is, lounging in a coffee shop and struck motionless by the sight in front of him: John, sitting at a table in the sun, leaning over his sketchbook and moving his pencil slowly across the paper. Alex isn't an expert, he might not know the history and the terminology, but looking at the curve of John's neck and the way the sunlight brings out the highlights in his hair, he knows art when he sees it.

* * *

John, falling in love

*

It takes John only ten seconds to realize he likes Alex and only eighteen hours to realize he _likes_ Alex. After that, hours turn to days turn to weeks, and he loses track of the time because Alex is everywhere and in everything, so comfortable that it doesn't feel like time is passing at all. That should have been his first clue, but in the end, it takes him fifty-two days and fifteen hours to realize, for the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn't go to bed at night half-hoping he won't wake up in the morning.

* * *

Herc, breakfast

*

Hercules appreciates his friends—the type of friends he never expected to make at this late stage in life, the type of friends that understand him deep down under his skin, the type of friends who'd start a fight, end a fight, steal a car, bury a body, do anything to have his back. He appreciates his friends, he loves his friends, but jesus fucking christ they're loud and energetic and give everything about two thousand percent and sometimes he just wants two minutes sit still and _exist_.

Which brings him here: 6am, tiny hole in the wall diner, strong coffee, excellent pancakes, and two whole hours to revel in the early morning silence before he heads into town and throws himself into the hustle and bustle of his day.

* * *

Burr, drunk and alone

*

Aaron's a quick study, so when his mother died and his father died and his grandfather died and he was shuffled about from relative to relative with no one to rely on and no one to trust, he learned his lesson: better to be by yourself, better to stand apart from the crowd, better to stand on the sidelines and look after your own interests and hold your tongue until you know it's safe. In the end, all you have is yourself and all you can do is work your hardest to be the best you can be, do everything you can to preserve your image, focus on what you can do and ignore the world around you.

It seems like a simple lesson, an easy edict to live his life by, but sitting alone in the corner of the bar, watching his classmates and labmates and co-workers drink together and laugh together and joke together and _be_ together, suddenly he wonders if he's ever done anything more difficult in his life.

* * *

Canon Angelica, leaving for London

*

She didn't leave because of Alexander. Though John valued her input, it really wasn't even her decision; his work was in London, his life was in London, and with the war over, it was time to return. She was his wife and London was his home and she wouldn't deny him that, was eager for the change of scenery even, happy to be faced with a new city to explore and a new social circle to dazzle.

(That doesn't mean, however, that she didn't breathe a sigh of relief as she boarded the boat and watched her sister and brother-in-law get smaller and smaller, watched the pain of what she couldn't have and the temptation of what she could shrink into the distance until it was out of sight and out of mind.)

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm fessing up. I had HOPED I would transition seamlessly from posting these ficlets to posting the next story, but it doesn't look like it's gonna shake out that way. I'm still on track to get this posted by the time I leave for DragonCon at the end of August, but I think I thought I had more ficlets than I did, because these are gonna run out before that, I think. WE'LL SEE HOW IT GOES, I may have written a couple more since I put the list together.


End file.
